Post #2

Photo by Robert Frank


Pietà
Kimberly Wang

your skeleton leaves and the
flash of pearly whites. my curtains were
sheer and you could see my lamp turned
down low.

                  Off on the mountainside is a cold creek. I remember the shape of your naked body in the spotted daylight, the glimpses I stole while pretending to not be embarrassed (Eve trying to undo her knowledge) when we went to bathe. Afterwards we sank our heels into the ground and twisted the grass with our toes, white roots and dark dirt upturned. You whispered into the ravines of my hair and pointed to the crows. We walked to that great white statue, to our Blessed Virgin Mary who stood bowed and watched over our town, over our storms and our seasons. Here you wept and I held on to your arm, like a widow clutches to her only son at the funeral (all the while, the son is thinking about how age is such a tricky thing). She is quiet, our Mary. The leaves are quiet. The ground is quiet. I listened to the air rushing out of your collapsing lungs, and I felt your trembling, and I swear I watched the shadows appear under your eyes. You were here just last week, staring into her blank eyes, having a conversation and a sandwich.
                 
                   When you return to your concrete-enforced apartment, you will, in your nervous energy, slam the windows shut and pull down the floral-print curtains we chose together. In the morning, you will replace them with some heavily-lined damask.

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Two Windows
Sarah Van Name

1. East

Light trickles through gauze curtains,

light grey-pink the color of broken skin.

Smoke already disparate and swirling

sweeps like a shock wave

across black-cat roofs and the razor-cut of the street.

I wake up to this false sunrise, fingers screaming in stiff cold.

2. West

The line of the horizon kisses the water,

kisses it black-blue like a rough-and-tumble lover.

The danger is in the mirage of the sailboat,

appearing like a supernova over that line of black and red.

But at sunset or any other time,

no boat rises.

3.

The chemical tang of home spices every breath.

Smoke is honest in its failure to promise,

and the ocean takes in too much to remember me.

I look towards what I know.