I have my pipe
and you
your cigarette
each
our bone
with a raindrop
in it
our grandfathers
are dead
are still
dead
and we’re
near a water
a water that is really
a circle
afraid
of stick figures
some of which
I still
draw
their invisible
zeroes
kissing
in a thunderstorm
that god
can’t remember
Knowing one will have a seizure that the others can watch, ache invents three empty-handed people who are closely based on the two still dying on the roof of a strip club. My first thought upon seeing any horse is that each horse is all the time thinking of its mother. I wait not to be taken but to be taken by the alien attracted to god. The family we don’t talk about burns trash in a silent film. No woman loves grief, but will check its facts.
~
what nightmares might boats have. do small bits of Hansel and Gretel enter the oral history of stowaways. oh pacing son of god, why does father worry his belly over an ant at peace
inside
of a worm. what if our whales are mostly absence and death passes me like a room
~
At the end of the day, it’s a very long day. The mirror believes it’s covered its belly. You ask me what hurts and I say earshot and show you the traffic cone my mother lifted from the world of tire swings. Everything you’ve written about the void being free is true. I secretly want your fingerprint and you secretly collect stock images of the born again. Will god never finish
the wind
~
and its use? this yearning, this alien attendance to the unsupervised moment? a childhood, perhaps. rugburns on the bellies of those who fall asleep to the song of you swimming from the water in your body. god returning to find again that our absence has been rearranged by the last infant to receive nostalgia. our self-harming sock puppets fresh from the diary of touch. an egg in the churchbell’s brain.
~
There is a part of my left hand that seems to know a fish with a nosebleed. If I could open the book of touch, I would open the book of touch. My son has a cough that haunts the leg of a wasp and his singing lives in a blank mother’s bottle of glue. Death recognizes more creatures than god.
These are my hands,
spider’s yawn and blueless blue.
A son’s belly cradles the crushed eye of god.
Even in a glass,
milk
looks lost.
age three inside of my arm there is a dark cloud that longs to live in a fingertip. age seven I am told there is a cloud but darkness belongs to my arm. age eight I forget which arm and ask no one. age now god uses a mother’s grief to eat the tail of a ghost. age then the angel of insect discipline has more newborns than teacups and blows on the bird-rolled dice. whole bodies fall asleep playing dead.
Emma Alexandrov is a student and a writer currently rooted in Atlanta, GA, Portland, OR, and Poughkeepsie, NY. She edits Windows Facing Windows Review.
~
Labyrinth Project
Sharp of being, you are embroidering my heart in the hollows
of our silences. We are tracing paths: by night, you take me
in your hands, a fish arcing muscular in capture.
Then, moored on a table, my core loosens in a dish of light,
whistling as it’s flooded and emptied of air. As you watch it
from across the room, threading the needle, it bristles to unfold.
It’s in the stitches that cell slush means body and
carbon whirrings mean soul, I know, but my throat can only
splutter at the spoiled water dripping from our thread because I know
I must be placed, unbalanced, back into the grey
with your golden line binding shut the new window in my side,
View original post 188 more words
the ocean is god’s shadow.
sex
the eater
of those looking
for food.
the hole has one dream.
I’ve love
for your mis
gendered Cain.
There is a part of my left hand that seems to know a fish with a nosebleed. If I could open the book of touch, I would open the book of touch. My son has a cough that haunts the leg of a wasp and his singing lives in a blank mother’s bottle of glue. Death recognizes more creatures than god.
The Flavor Of The Other
poems, Clara Burghelea
Dos Madres, 2020
~
Clara Burghelea’s The Flavor of the Other is both a progressive exit and an appearing act. Inside of each, stillness awaits no inheritance. Full of confessional reserve and prayers that maybe begin with amen, these poems carry the exaggerated possessions of location as the divided theft of void and oblivion. Burghelea knows taste as a portal through which one can swap hungers, and makes of self an otherness versed in the familiarities of a becoming not saddled with being. If it is here that migration and exile are two birdwatchers marked by the same talon, then a reader may place themselves as one combed by any scar that holds hair as the body’s longest fire while another counts backward then forward using absence as census.
~
reflection by Barton Smock
~
book is here:
https://www.dosmadres.com/shop/flavor-of-the-other-by-clara-burghelea/
kingsoftrain 