Blink out the stars, tangle blue in my throat, your fingers pull the knot in my sweatpants, palm to navel push, hunger takes over, slips up torso, left breast, tongue your blue highway print on chest and neck, marking me for silent screams, wild hair pull, my head, your hands cradle before freefall, my body, […]
Contributors 89
Jed Myers: Place Poem
I’m traveling in my bed. If all spins hold, I’ll wake amid these sheets, by dawn a good ten thousand miles round a whirlpool in a whirlpool down attraction’s great cold funnel— battened in my elevated hovel, held in its grid of I-beams hauled along by crust east, with street and coast and continent, all […]
Aurora Myers: Aquatic Annelid
Did you know that a leech isn’t felt by the hairs of your leg because it spits anesthetic when making its incision? And the host gets a dose of anticoagulant to keep blood flowing, stimulating circulation… Sometimes when you kiss me, digging your heels into the Earth, licking the spit off my face, serenading the […]
Joddy Murray: Sentinel
Small stones in a cobalt bird feeder— two eyes in a sanguine café, each pushing each right and forward, the scratch of heavy clouds, heavy air, and haloed light, one per light pole. Eyes digging as they scan—scarring, shoveling as they go like a claw-loader picking out its own oil-drenched soil, its own footing, and […]
H.M. Merjian: Father Phantom
“I desperately tried to shake him off, but the monster pressed his thighs tighter and tighter around my throat until I could no longer breathe.” Sinbad: “Thousand and One Nights” When I grew older the other creature appeared, The second father formed, a putrid pisachee He carried on his back, its nails knived into his […]
H.M. Merjian: Aleppo: 1915
“You eat the eyes first. Do you understand?” In the large dish a boiled lamb’s head In broth, “patcha” —lamb’s head soup. The feast of Easter; Paschal Anatolia. I dreaded the festival of the head, This ritual of eating the lamb of god, Leaving what simple sins my childhood Offered, the mouth, the hot white […]