Tag: Women

The Algorithm Sells Me a New Bra 

.Reading time 5 minutes.

By Emily Banks

Hate bras? This is the bra for you.
I can’t gatekeep. I hadn’t worn a bra in years
but this changed me. Are you a member
of the Itty Bitty Titty Club (IBTC)?
Well it’s here finally, a bra made for small cups. No more gapping.
I threw all my old bras in the trash when I tried this on.
I just ordered four more. Have you been wearing the wrong size
since you were ten and your mother wrapped you up
with her measuring tape, told you to stand still, straight?
We’ll tell you your True Size. Take this quick quiz
and give us your email. We’ll send you emails till you buy
a bra from us or die. What do you mean
you want to unsubscribe? This is our best offer, only one time.
I used to believe wireless bras couldn’t work
for big boobs like mine. That was until I tried—I can’t gatekeep.
This one is for my girls who are blessed in the chest.
This year we’re kicking underwire to the curb.
This year we’re breaking up with cup spillage.
This year we’re saying no to uniboob
and constant pain. Listen, you need to see this for yourself.
My bestie asked if I’d gotten a boob job.
I’ve never had cleavage before this bra.
This bra is magic. Watch how it disappears under my tee.
Watch how it makes my back fat disappear.
Does your size fluctuate throughout your cycle?
Girl, mine too. Girl, this one is for you.
Stop what you’re doing now and listen up.
These straps won’t slip or dig into your skin
branding you with crimson marks that take
forever to fade. So easy to adjust! This is the very bra
Taylor Swift wore rehearsing for the Eras Tour.
It improves your posture and your mental health.
I can’t gatekeep. I quit therapy after wearing this for a day.
My boyfriend asked if I’d started a new anti-depressant.
Ladies, this is not a normal bra.
It feels like I’m wearing a cloud.
It feels like I’m floating on an innertube
with my bestie back when we were still too young
for bras. I fall asleep in it. Work out in it.
I’ve updated my will to request
they bury me in it. Because this is heaven:
no more gapping, no uniboob, no endless, lonely ache
so subtle you stop noticing it till it’s gone.
These pads can be removed for customized cleavage.
This is my new “have to leave the house” bra.
This is my new “have to turn the Zoom camera on” bra.
This is my new “have to drag myself from bed
although what’s the point really” bra.
Its band never rides up. My ride-or-die.
You’ll wear it the store. Wear it to work. The gym.
To make dinner, to load the dishwasher.
To Swiffer the floor and vacuum the rug, scroll through a feed
of wedding anniversaries and new babies,
cocktails on beaches, the friends you meant to keep
up with and men you once turned down looking happy,
check Facebook Memories.
Girl, you can stop scrolling.
I can’t gatekeep: this is the first bra
I don’t take off as soon I get home. This is it for me.
This is the support I’ve been needing.
Oh my God, this changes everything.   

Read More

Landscape as Restoration

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Hannah Smith
Featured Art: “1000 Miles From Nowhere” by Mallory Stowe

You can say a prairie fits into a plain,
but not the other way around.
Like a square and a rectangle, I’ve been
looking for boundaries, sharp corners

I might tuck myself into. The plain
is both a noun and an adjective, a landscape
and a modifier to mean common. I’ve been called
a common woman: a forgetful blonde girl

in a bluebonnet pasture who must’ve been
asking for it. An ask can also be a prayer,
with the added expectation of an answer.
If I can fit myself into small spaces,

on a molecular level, I might see my compounds
in soil chemistry. Wildflower is synonymous
with weed, and that’s an issue with differing
opinions of beauty. Weeds restore

over-exposed soils, fertilize degraded spreads.
You can’t construct a new ecosystem,
but you can repair one that’s breaking.
I’m building another bionetwork that’s anything

but ordinary. Some day soon, I’ll find
myself in a prairie patch along the floodplains.
A sewing needle in hand, and a bucket
of rain-ripe compost.

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The Foremothers

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Maria Dylan Himmelman

sharpen knives with their teeth, adjust their shawls
to hide their tails and make tiny feather quilts
to keep the birds warm. They char quail eggs
with their breath, serve them on bone China
with sucking candies, then ask if you’re certain
you turned the stove off before you left the house
Their closets are filled with carpets and spice, bolts
of silk and roast chicken. Their medicine chests
are stuffed with opium, hemlock and baby aspirin
In response to most questions they say—
Turn it, turn it, for all is in it, and for this it is said
their price is far above pearls 

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Mrs. Love  

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Elisabeth Murawski

Featured Art: “Mr. Love” by Leo Arkus

An adult neither liked 
nor disliked, 

she taught music 
appreciation, 

played 78s of Verdi  
and Bizet. 

Teens in letter 
sweaters, we were 

the children 
she didn’t care 

to know. A thin 
gold band on a red- 

nailed finger 
declared she’d snagged 

a Mr. Love 
so long ago we  

weren’t even born. 
She seemed resigned 

as our parents were 
to not going  

anywhere, tapping  
her black shoe 

like a metronome 
while reckless Carmen 

goaded Don Jose, 
Radames and Aida  

smothered 
in the tomb scene. 

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Acquainted with the Night  

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Erin Redfern

Featured art by Jordyn Roderick

At the all-girls school they taught us  
don’t fight back: the rapist might get mad.  

Against my will, I remember this  

when I need to take a walk to clear my head.  
When I fear the sound of feet, a distance  

closing. When I drop my eyes in passing,  

my neck for decades bending. On the train  
a man asks me what I’m reading. Show me  

the Great American Writer; I’ll show you  

a man who finds by walking out alone 
what freedom is,  

and, so, America, I want to be  

the kind of woman who walks into night,  
a fine rain, her own thoughts.  

If at dusk I hear a clutch of cries 

and rush of wings from powerlines.  
If I love a spread of stars, dark wind in trees. 

If walking is a bodied way of thinking. 

If I love a subway map, a screech of trains. 
If walking out and back intact is luck. 

If I have been a long time without thinking. 

If I wanted to go there by myself

thinking. If I just wanted to go somewhere.  


Quoted phrases and lines are from Robert Frost, “Acquainted With the Night”; Judy Grahn, “A Woman Is Talking to Death”; Kim Moore, “On the train a man asks me what I’m reading”; June Jordan, “Power”; Lisa Shen, “Sixteen Seconds”  

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Evicted

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Mary Jo Firth Gillet

Before the suck and stutter of the first breath, even
before the first cells hook up for an amniotic float in
if not primordial bliss then something just this side of it,
there was the want, the desire that begat the pre-child
then stuck in a world impossible to remember, impossible
not to feel sorrow mixed with joy over my newborn’s
eviction from her Eden, her tenderest of faultless flesh
now to know the endless hunger, the deep cold of alone,
the body a riot of wants, wants unto the last gasp
of my mother’s four-foot-nine-inch fierce frame, every inch
railing railing against the bait-and-switch trickster’s scythe,
her only wish the hunger for more days, more life, and so
someone from hospice calls me to come get this inconvenient,
angry woman who will not go gentle into that good night.

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Chapter IV. The Suffocation of the Mother

.Reading time 19 minutes.

By Savannah DiGregorio

Excerpts from The Extant Works of Aretaeus The Cappadocian, translated by Francis Adams (1856), A Brief Discovery of a Disease called the Suffocation of the Mother (1603) by Edward Jorden

In the middle flanks of women lies the womb, a female
viscus, closely resembling an animal; for it is moved of
itself hither and thither. In a word, it is altogether erratic.

                                                                            You made an aquarium of my insides. Sculpted
                                                                            salty marshlands out of meaty pulp. Fashioned
                                                                           algae nests from fleshy sinew, white & crooked
                                                                                                     as the half-moons of fingernails.

You napped in the hollows of my ribcage. Nestled
your mighty body into hammocks of irish moss. Smacked
on sugar kelp like pink chewing gum, sapped & sweet
as the raw nerves under cracked teeth.

                                                                             In fragrant smells it also delights and advances
                                                                     toward them. To fetid smells, it has an aversion, and
                                                                        flees from them. On the whole, the womb is like an
                                                                                                                  animal within an animal.

From deep inside me you now roar. Crying
and howling until my whole belly
sometimes lifts.

                                                                           When, therefore, it is suddenly carried upwards,
                                                                    and remains above for a considerable time, violently
                                                                      compressing the intestines, the woman experiences
                                                                                                                                                choking.

                                                      My organs; an oblation to you.

For the liver, diaphragm, and lungs are quickly
squeezed within a narrow space; and therefore loss
of breathing and speech seems to be present.

                                                                                                                 With teeth clamped shut,
                                                                                                         our hearts convulse in chorus.

This suffocation from the womb accompanies females
                                             alone.

                                                                                    Men stuff partridge feathers and hot coals
                                                                                                                    inside my nostrils. Prod
                                                                                                       blisters on my breasts—blindly,
                                                                                                      as newborn kits search for milk.

Those from the uterus are remedied by fetid smells,
and the application of fragrant things. A pessary
induces abortion and a powerful congelation of the
womb.

                                                                                                              From me you surface burnt
                                                                                                 and hemorrhaging on sorrow. Like
                                                                                                                that of slaughtered swine.

                                                      Grief comes with sponge and pail.
                                                      Scours my soul—barren,
                                                      we laugh ourselves to sleep.

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What It Looks Like

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Emily Wheeler

Featured Art by Glenna Parry

Returning from emptying 
compost out back,
I’m stopped 
by a praying mantis.
Don’t you look fabulous,

I hear my mother’s voice,
Dressed to kill and
to blend in, with just
a flash of emerald 
on your lower wing. 

I hear her say, 
Your feelers, are they new,
or are you parting 
them differently?  
Also, great figure!

I see her swooning
over its eyes that pop 
without any makeup,
and the way its face 
comes to a point 

at its delicate chin: 
really quite special.
To me, the mantis 
just stares, nods, 
possibly politely.

My mother appreciates
many kinds of beauty
and the bug’s elegant 
plus alluring look
but I know

its brown egg sac 
is hard as cement to protect 
the eggs from heat, cold, 
even the occasional maternal 
appetite for its young.

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Horses in a Field

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Emily Blair

I am reading my book manuscript to my mother
in her backyard. She tells me that was probably a catbird
I saw earlier. She tells me bleach is the real way
to get stains out of grout. The narrative urge is a strong one,
she says. She had an invisible horse, but never said
she wanted to be one. On that last point, we disagree.
Perhaps it was only a feeling I had
when we were watching horses in a field. That blurring of beings.
Like the colors in a Vuillard painting. A dress turning into
a table or an orchard. My college painting teacher said edges
are important, but never explained how best to create them.
I wanted us to be old ladies together, I say to my mother,
meaning me and her. Now we know it isn’t going to happen.
But she says she was dreading it—she didn’t want to be here
to see me grow old. We decide death comes too soon,
in the second section of my manuscript—
And speaking of death, how can the deck chair cushions
still have a cat hair side, I ask her,
now that the cats have been dead for years.
Because we’re disgusting old people, she replies
with a laugh, meaning herself and my stepfather.
Though the truth is I’m the sloppy one. This redbud tree
is a new redbud tree and I didn’t even notice.
I didn’t notice the new flowers she potted either, lined up
with their brilliant blossoms, waiting
to be put on the front porch. It’s all one to me:
the backyard, the flowers, my mother, me.
How can any of it exist without the rest?
We agree that I’ve written too many poems,
and they don’t go together.

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History of Desire

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Lisa C. Krueger

Featured Art: Day 7 by John Sabraw

I.

In the photograph
my mother is ten;
she poses in a ruffled dress
and hand-me-down coat
that swallows her arms
the way shame swallows
people whole.

Lost in the oversize. Standing
near a clapboard porch.
She knows she is poor,
one of the poorest; her shoes
are too tight. Other children
tease her about the key
around her neck.

My mother makes drawings
of what she can’t buy;
it will take years, and
thousands of dollars,
for her to learn that money
does not make her happy.

In the photo, my mother smiles
upward like the glamorous people
in magazines. She tapes sketches
of stars to her wall, studies them
before she falls asleep.

II.

My grandmother sews clothes
for my mother; she doesn’t
need patterns, she has learned
to make things on her own
from what her mind can see.
My grandmother is a bank teller,
on her feet all day; tellers
are not allowed to sit. Only night
belongs to her. My mother
hears the machine, an animal
that growls in the dark.

III.

My mother’s walls are rich
in the way my daughter’s walls
will be, covered in desire.
My daughter will labor
over vision boards, collage
pictures of people and places
to help dreams come true,
what vision boards can do.   

My daughter will stack magazines
by her bed, take scissors
to girls playing sports
with those beautiful bodies,
magnificent boys with interested eyes.
Picnics – dances – all the weddings –
cut out –

IV.

Sometimes, awake
with my own futility,
what I can’t do for my child,
I will picture the grandmother
I never knew,
bent over small light,
laboring. How many hours
to stitch ruffles?

V.

Standing, my mother crosses
her legs, an awkward pose,
perhaps one she has seen
in a star.  Balanced forever.
Pinned to a wall.

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Ode to the White Girl at the Gym

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Shavahn Dorris-Jefferson

White girl with the slender legs, I’ve been measuring myself
by those yardsticks, trying to fit into the cocoon of your skinny
jeans and make this butt a butterfly. White girl with the limpy locks—

angel hair—I’m running behind you on the track, watching your ponytail,
a pendulum, swing back and forth and back again. I bet even the hair
in between your thighs is smooth as thread, your knuckle frizz

a fine, fine filament. You fair thing! The way you stop to stretch,
raising your arms without thinking, bending back without looking
to see who’s behind you. O how I want you and hate you.

Or want to hate you. Or hate to want you. Butter-skinned
beauty, I could swallow you whole and alive.

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Mass

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Jeff Tigchelaar


1. Jana, in for a mammogram 

So they give you these special shirts: 
easy-open fronts. 
Post procedure they herd you 
into this room where others in the same boat 
and shirt
must sit 
and wait. 
I walk in say Oh how embarrassing 
we’re all wearing the same top
to no response. The TV’s tuned 
to daytime talk, nobody watching. I offer 
to change the channel or turn it off. 
No takers. A few seconds later: “Up next! 
How one woman got the news that would 
change her life forever: ‘I found out 
I had breast cancer!’” Then someone 
says Yeah no we’re shutting that off
and gets up and does the deed. 
A minute later this same woman gets 
her results. And they were 
good. Very good. 
They were perfect.
And she jumped, whooped, pumped her fists 
said Praise Sweet Jesus and her boobs 
popped right out of that special shirt 

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Essential Worker

.Reading time 1 minute.

By J.C. Talamantez

Featured art: maternal memories, 2019 by Emma Stefanoff

When you were a girl, you thought about
            what kind of woman you would be

            how you would differ
                           from her / her life in hardening hands
                                       the work, an early marriage
                                                   then the angry one
            her suspect taste in men
                           that she hung on when there was nothing
                                       left to hang
            kept laboring the labor
                           the men wouldn’t do

            It was a long time to undo / the belief
                                 that to be a woman is partial
                              a life of shadows joining

                           and sometimes i still feel
                                       like a dog always checking
                                             its masters eyes

You wanted / to be a woman
         this is what it is sometimes

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A Coyote Runs Down Michigan Avenue

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Sara Ryan

Featured Art: “The Bridge: Nocturne (Nocturne: Queensboro Bridge)” by Julien Alden Weir

and she is a phantom. gray blur on
gray pavement. green lights flicker

their rhythmic patterns. in the right building,
at the right angle, she becomes one

thousand coyotes shimmering in glass.
she screams and Chicago screams

back. howls. scavenges the oily corners
of the train stations. the river gulps

through its channels and feeds the lake.
she is a wild thing. she crosses high bridges.

she becomes the color blue. she becomes
the color blood. the city is haunted

now. by the trees. by women, their mouths
full—bulging, really—with fur. she is one

of the lucky ones. she runs unjailed without
worry for traffic, turn signals, speed limits.

ghosts wearing masks yell from
their windows. they’re warning her.

they’re warning her.

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Laywoman

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Jeff Tigchelaar

Featured Art: Blue Cat by Dar Whitlatch, Jason Douglas, Mallory Valentour

Evenings, let me tell you, are for

coming down. Going home and getting

into bed. Or slippers, at least. Yeah I’ve got bunny slippers

and there’s no shame in that. My only child

is insane. I don’t care who thinks

what about my PJs, either. I sleep

in a faded 4X orange and green T-shirt worn for years

by my father before me. So thin you can see my nips.

If you were looking, that is.

At the mercantile today I couldn’t stop thinking

about how I always just keep looking – nodding –

at Dr. Prajeet even when I haven’t

the slightest what he’s on about.

How hard would it be

– wink – just to say “Dr. Prajeet,

if you wouldn’t mind reiterating a bit –

you know . . . in laywoman’s terms?” Just ask him.

Laywoman, Dr. Prajeet. That’s me.

I wonder what I’d say if Dr. P. asked me

to elope. Off to some far land. Or even if he just asked me

out. Dancing, maybe. Here in town. I wonder what my little

Richie would think about that. If you don’t want mommy

coming home with doctors, don’t be a grown man living

with mom. Maybe I’d say that to old Mr. Ricardo.

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The Dock Hand

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Kathryn Merwin

this is a poem about losing things.

not a poem

for the boys who barreled their broken

bodies into the lightningwalls

of my body. for the knife

of let me       

in, baby, the trigger-finger

of let’s

go back to my place, just one drink.    

you, draining the blue

from my veins, dyeing

empty sheets of skin,

blue again, purple,

blue. the color

of healing of bloodpool

       beneath skin.  for the crushed

       powder in my jack & coke of

no one will ever believe you.

you’ll spend the summer in alaska

and we’ll both pretend

like we’re not losing

something.

you have no idea

       what i’m gonna do       to you.

yes,            I do.

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Just Like All the Girls

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Francesca Bell

Featured Art: “The Sea of Memory and Forgetfulness” by Madara Mason

I always knew

a man waited for me somewhere
with hands that fit the particular curves
of my treacherous body.

Whether I watched for him or not.
Whether I believed.

Sometimes, in dreams, he entered me from above,
like a coffin lowered slowly into a grave.

Sometimes he held me hard from behind.

The hills scorched golden each summer.
My hair was streaked the color of dried-dead grass.

People said I was lucky to have it.

Every year, moths fluttered
against the trees’ dark trunks as I passed,
like scraps of parchment.

An infestation that maybe would, maybe would not, kill the oaks.

I dared myself to wonder
around which bend
would he find me.

Wherever I looked were signs.

The steep ridge, a gray fox hunting
at the slough’s edge, V of geese going over.

World of enchantment,
and I wandered precarious,

my steps disturbing the air,
their small sound like beads
counting out prayers.

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Bit

.Reading time 5 minutes.

By LaTanya McQueen

Because of her own curiosity she said yes when he asked her to put the bit on him. The bit, or gag, was an iron mask shaped like half a moon with a hook that went around the front of a person’s head. A spiked collar connected to the mask through a lock at the back of the neck.

He collected historical artifacts like these, the iron bit and scold’s bridle women were once punished with wearing, the shackles and chains forced upon slaves, items all from a not-too-distant era. When she asked him why, he told her he had a fascination for history long forgotten.

“Forgotten?” she asked and he shrugged in response.

She was used to men wanting things like this from her, to be blindfolded with her wrists cuffed and legs tied. She’d been expecting a day to come when he’d ask her if she would wear the bit, because hadn’t their relationship been leading up to this? Men, both white and black alike, were always asking in various ways to put her in this position, one of servitude, of serving. They wanted her on her back with her legs spread, body motionless, a mouth open only for moaning or what he’d force in. So many of them held this secret desire within themselves but eventually, with time, they always found a way to tell her.

She picked the bit up. As she felt its weight, she imagined what her fore-bearers must have experienced as the iron was fastened on. “Where did you get this?”

“eBay,” he said. The simplicity of his answer made her laugh. She asked him if it was real.

“I think so. Go ahead. Put it on,” he urged, and she did.

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Naked, Fierce, Yelling Stone Age Grannies

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Lisa Bellamy

Featured Art: by Evelyn De Morgan

I shudder when I think of the giant beavers—
tiny-brained, squinting Pleistocene thugs—
they bared rotting incisors longer than a human arm,
they infested ponds and rivers, smothered
gasping sh with their acid-spiked, toxic urine,
they slapped their murderous tails—bleating,
they dragged themselves up the riverbank,
spied sweetgrass; they charged the crawling babies,
the tiny baby bones, trampling, they didn’t care—
hurray for the naked, fierce, yelling Stone Age grannies—
they dropped their hammer stones, they grabbed
sharp sticks. Who can forget their skinny, bouncing breasts?
They beat the giant beavers, they speared; they smeared
hot, thick beaver blood over each other’s faces,
their bony, serviceable buttocks—who can forget the grannies—

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Cockadoodledoo

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Chrys Tobey

Our parson to the old women’s faces
That are cold and folded, like plucked dead hens’ arses.
—Ted Hughes

An old woman thought her face was a dead
hen’s arse. Maybe it was all the years
of plucking and waxing. The woman had no idea
what would make her think her face
was a dead hen’s arse and not a live hen’s
arse, and why the arse and not the beak, but
she did. It couldn’t be my age, the woman thought.

It couldn’t be the men, not when everyone knows men
love older women, especially much older, especially
with all the grandma porn, all the old women sex
costumes, all the men who ogle elderly women in walkers.
She had read so many books where men longed
for older women, where old women seduced helpless
wide-eyed men. She saw billboards where old women
modeled teenage clothing, modeled Brazilian
bathing suit bottoms. And she knew the trend: folding
wrinkles into one’s face using a Dumpling Dough Press.

People would stop her and take selfies. You look
like a movie star, they’d say. They wouldn’t leave her alone.
She’d shrug. Maybe it was the way she’d sometimes cluck
when she made love to her husband? This could be the reason
he’d whisper, One day I may trade you in for an older model.
Or maybe it was all the eggs she ate. Or her penchant for feathers.
Or how her mother used to call her my little chickadee. The woman
was unsure why she thought her face was a dead fowl’s
feces-extruding cloaca. She only knew she was tired
of seeing twenty-year-old men with women who could
be their grandmothers, old women who treated the men
like so many dimpled birds.

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Women in Treatment

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Theresa Burns

Featured Art by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Why had I not noticed them
before? The women in treatment
on every block, it seems, leaving
the library, walking their dogs.
Once they hid themselves
beneath wigs, fashionable hats
in the city, or entered softly
in Birkenstocks and baseball caps,
stayed out of the way. Now they
show up, unannounced.
In offices, in waiting rooms,
in aisle seats with legs outstretched,
the women in treatment
flip the pages, reach the end,
bald, emboldened. One
outside a florist today arranges
lantana in time for evening
rush. A bright silk scarf
around her pale round head
calls attention to her Supermoon.
And one woman my own age,
in my own town, takes up a table
right in front. She nurses a chai latte
in a purple jacket, her hair
making its gentle comeback.
What she pens in a small
leather notebook: a grocery list?
Ode to her half-finished
French toast? The kind of poem
living people write.

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Miss Peach Considers #8: Reproduce

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Catie Rosemurgy

A paperweight of sorts.
A shiny genetic clip for the stack of notes she’s become
on carbon dating, lozenges, and “getting over it.”

On a park bench she could lean over
to the other stunned, unmade-up mothers
who stare like cruelly unfinished paintings.
She could say, we are the giant price tags
that once hung off them.

A penny to toss in the well.
Mindlessness held together by bones.
Something that happened once in the distance,
like a war or an arctic expedition.

A list of ways she would try not to feel about a son or a daughter.
A list of choking hazards and a list
of times she will have peeled back the curtain
for him or her by age seven.
A list of golf courses and shades of blue.

Her penmanship begins to pile up and look like sticks,
like an attempt at a tiny fire left on a stone.

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Miss Peach Considers the Human Condition

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Catie Rosemurgy

Featured Art: A Bouquet of Flowers by Clara Peters

It’s OK to feel important.

The swelling between our legs
indicates we are the rarest of flowers.

We bloom in only the most
idiosyncratic conditions: rubber,

misery, great shoes. The other day

I realized that we can’t spit
without hitting grass or something else

that implies the necessity
of our experience, of our greatness.

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The Bad Wife

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Elizabeth Powell

The door’s made of gingerbread that the rats have eaten through.
You finger your record albums like cold, frigid women.
You could be more silent than silence without much of a fight.
I float, a birthday party balloon you let go into the deepening sky.
How I once felt my life against yours, two pieces of burnt toast.
The town had zoned me for you, now I’m a wetlands—
You can’t run your cable under my land anymore.
There’s nothing wrong with you, just as there is nothing wrong with the sky.
At my core, a humming gas heater, rusted, though still useful.
Nothing loves the world as a mortal soul can.
Yet the very word domestication sounds like a zoo for housewives.
Let’s see—what prayer was it we were saying?
Yes (of course), the one that got us here.
Once I loved you madly, like a girl pirate,
Now I use my sword to pick up moldy, low-loft towels from the floor.
Now we wear headsets because we can’t hear our own music.
Once I was your bride, now nothing more than a mermaid nun,
And the sea is so choppy, torrential, wild, biblical with sadness.
Oh, once you smelled of mint, of truth.

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