apparition, or mom
at her most forgetful.
mouth, a shapeshifter’s
chew toy
godless
as a belly button
and babied
by grief.
face, face.
do they not
look
finished
ear to ear, the toddlers…
their tornado
still theirs, and today’s
sermon
still in the mind
of their mother’s
exterminator
boyfriend
who is having a thought
as rare
as his past, of a god
spotting
from a cobweb
a carcass
and deciding
the boy whose clothes have been taken will swim for hours and for hours know why the soul hides death from god
T. M. Strong comes from a small train town in New Mexico where rainstorms are precious and ravens build nests in sandstone crevices. A graduate of the Alpha Young Writers Workshop, she is currently studying Creative Writing at a small arts college.
~*~
Tiger-Ghost
The tiger pushes open the door after dusk,
flat head pressing into wire-brushed wood.
She slinks, calloused pads rasping against the floor.
A ghost. She appears behind you in the kitchen
where you have stirred the stew:
four to the right
three to the left to make seven, stretched out
to luck. Look,
her eyes, reflected in the steel pot, are gold, ochre,
last night’s sunset you think she watched from the railing
of a highway bridge. You step carefully across
the bloody, sticky tracks she left on the floor to set the table.
In winter, she brings snow.
In autumn, muddy twigs,
like wands, you line up on…
View original post 405 more words
a shadow’s private gravity (a fly on a grieving radar
years from the event of my body, we pass in the grocery. I tell your children they are attached to nothing, that my arm cast is made of fingernails, that a bruise has a shadow, and that a mouth is where a mouth goes to die. truth has no attention span. it is not my favorite dream. partly this is so because I can remember how with a grey marker I drew on my belly the easier fruits might the identified heal the recognized. (but the kids are ugly and seem to know
waiting for her cigarettes to dry, mother starts a bath and says above them that it’s not like any of you are becoming a rib. death, short a person, continues to eat the language god hasn’t. trauma makes a compass of time and place
and brother is not yet the sitting creature of a thoughtless life. I am not there but am allowed to be. I so miss birds.
(the ghost fame of each tadpole
Michael Prihoda lives in central Indiana. He is the editor of After the Pause, an experimental literary magazine and small press. His work has received nominations for the Pushcart Prize and the Best of the Net Anthology and he is the author of eight poetry collections, most recently Years Without Room (Weasel Press, 2018).
***
understand a spiderweb & how it doesn’t have wings
for Casey Mcleod, after teaching 8th grade English for two years
am i art
to twenty
humans?
or only
a prayer
of future’s
anteroom.
i hold
no keys
yet i must
hand them
a padlock
of fingered
combination,
learn them
a twist
of sleight
tourniquet.
for they
bleed
earlier
than i ever did
& i don’t
quite believe
any promise
of ocean
could fathom
this canoe.
**
another city
remember
how
the snow
in St. Paul
turned flaxen,
tannic and gray
as the inside
of…
View original post 53 more words
it’s not my imagination that I’m the only foreigner my body recalls, but is that god can change with my stomach the shape of his tears
