Issue 3

What a curse: how I hate to be touched at all—a boiled-hard
shell, a bell jar of birthday smoke.

your secret skin exposed, baby soft, and unprotected

i want that pearl now / to cut it from the clam dress

With or without him, a glass next to the bed. A compulsion I turn toward each morning.

I know / lichens and mushrooms, I’m sewn / in their quietest tongues. Grief is a stillness

it’s fine it’s / a cocked wrist / close the door

Myth: The lilac cries salt. / Fact: When you are outside, / the gardens darken

I keep the small, sustaining things near: / a kettle, a stone, a blanket /
for my fingers to fiddle with—

Stop. There is no cipher /
Only sorrow. You must know /
By now

you are too young to understand that his hands shouldn’t move like that and you shouldn’t breathe like that. you did not know until you laid next to a sleeping woman for the first time

I try to think of gentleness but instead imagine floods, soaked and rumbling riverine earth.

When you finished coring out his bones, you climbed his battered spine, creeped near his ear and whispered the first of many lies