Poetry

Here, the lichens are blue-green like copper silicates, and everything is horizontal in the gales that last for three days. With this isolation it’s a near-certainty I can cobble together a second creature in my new laboratory beneath the aurora. I dreamt last night of an apothecary’s rose where the heart was, and when I…

Nuns have brought kneaded dough into the chapel where it rises without a draught silence brims with this creature of bread, the smell of yeast against stone while outside, the perfect accident of corn ripening the light.

My death grew along the edge of the yard. I’d crawl into her temple of plummet and root and once inside her heart it was hard to leave. I’d grow drowsy in the odor of her resin. Crushing the berries, I’d smell my fingers: they smelled of calamine and vomit. Through the roof of the…

I knew how to check for bullets: cylinder release, two fingers through the frame: five tiny seeds, five answers to questions my head kept asking. While my parents were at work, I dug dad’s revolver from his sock drawer and carried it around the house. I rubbed the cool barrel on my cheeks, traced it…

It is the train-off-a-cliff courting, the half-mast eyes across a room, fingers lingering too long on the exchange of a book, a cigarette, an apple. Nights of seeing a face in the moon and finally leaving the window to walk empty dawn streets in search of a rock or flower to hold in your pocket…

Maybe a year can be just what’s needed toting its days as a cloud its night fresh from the dark A year might throw light on everything who knows so that all is known and understood that would be nice or a year might fail to please not ever wish to please A year involves…

Some years are light as air you don’t even have to lift them from your memory they float their weightless goodies in and out of your today with less fuss than a summer cloud roaming the sky but other years are heavy as a suitcase full of a murdered torso heavier than plutonium or osmium…

Can you believe I have cancer? Yosra asks, holding a mug of tea between her hands, her hair close to her scalp, almost laughing. I try to imagine the cancer auditioning inside her body, tiny translucent slivers of light weaving in and out and of her abdomen and uterus, traveling up and through her throat,…

Sometimes it’s tucked into itself, sewn up like the lips of a prisoner. After the procedure, the girls learn how to walk again, mermaids with new legs, soft knees buckling under their new sinless bodies. Daughter is synonymous with traitor, the father says. If your mother survived it, you can. Cut, cut, cut. One girl…