when you burned down my house
i tried to rebuild: monuments of soot
trampled beliefs trying to pull meaning
from the inside of a cedar tree
and i carved. i carved you, next to
a motherless god, a wifeless god,
a god that poured fires over still
waters and begged to be left alone
behind a curtain, gold rods and gold seams
fraying at the end like the veins
that tied me to you, kept us sprouting
branches instead of scorched forest,
the center of the earth crumbling into
itself a dead leaf;
a home turned skeleton.
– Alyssa Hanna…
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To speak of the living like limestone,
as if they were brittle.
Alone and full, I gaze up.
Anything in the sky
– always –
a convex void repelling me back.
Silent, I watched his ankles
dangle from the pier, swollen and blotched ––
the skin a discolored canvas
stretched over puff and bone.
And my throat closing. How to speak of his
illness without admitting decay?
We didn’t. His face towards us ––
now –– a soft presence
through the leaves.
– Bevil Townsend…
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A
fledgling fell from the steep
elm branches last night, never learning
to fly. We crept over dew, thinking it asleep,
and learned the truth.
Hallmark strangeness
of childhood, finding things can die.
Like learning our parents had names,
it tumbled us out of ourselves
into an expanding world
where the metallic twist of pennies
on tongues echoed
in blood.
Life released slowly to us, unfolding
its creases—a map of courtesies
letting us stay small and close.
But it rushed
when we lifted feathers
limp and cold, light,
and folded death in a box
atop a broken nest.
If life came all at once,
we could never learn to breathe,
to speak. Never learn bird and flight and tree,
fall or death or broken,
never blink
or become ourselves.…
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We all start in water ‒ endure its fullness,
bellies hoarding each molecule,
the swell of its ocean yelling
to our bones.
So when her tide breaks,
she’s hauled from
the house with the knowledge
she’s rupturing.
I brim mid-stride
on the uneven pavement, split our blood
for the first time. She watches me
glisten across tarmac,
takes her fulsome weight from the kerb
to the taxi, hopes to replenish
us both with a sack full of saline,
knows
she’s not the right one
to receive the cuckoo-baby nestling
in the thud of her pelvic bones.
– Abegail Morley…
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You are four years
old. Your father hands you a brick. He says, “This is lighter
than it feels.”
You are in a garage. The walls are cluttered with newspaper – photos of aftermaths. Rusted tools hang from the ceiling. The
concrete floor is splattered with grease. Your father grunts against a band
saw. Sawdust floats into your breath.
You drop the brick while you are testing its lightness. You stare
at the blood. You stare at your separation. Your toenail ripped off. The flesh
underneath is hot pink. You can’t remember if you cried.
Your father begins sanding wood.
– Heather Warren…
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here, in a skinny creek
between dilapidated banks cleaved
and dark with clay, root-veins, your feet go numb; upwards,
his eyes grow bright in sky’s grotesque light—
your shoulders, cold, glow;
come to know his quivering palms, and then
his tongue is lapping into yours, summoning splash
and slap of sauntering stream
who teaches boys the vocabulary of body
anyway? cornea, cervix, thigh, but in truth
you too have unnamed yourself: aphasic
and dazed, goose-bumped beneath
sky unzipping, sky kissing mountaintops, (smothering
itself in their teeth,) and still
a boy’s eyes and hands down and up on you
his blood-pink lips whispering commanded
praise: stretch, spread, slip, a creek
turning surely to ice around feet
– Emma Karnes
Author’s Note: “make-out creek” seeks to address the anxieties, thrills, and confusions of girls’ early sexual experiences.…
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Deep in the house
in the pit of the house
where the concrete sweats
there is a stain
and a leak so slow
it tastes of the dust
that it gleans in the rising—
It clings to us
a humid grit
that will stick
to the skin
a word lodged in
a throat
a secret shame.…
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