 Photo by Mario Azzi on Unsplash Before He steals your breath sometimes. The story you tell is a fine line passed from his lips and tongue as he holds you down. You memorize him quickly; this will be on the test. You are girlfriend: the only one who understands him. Once, he punches the door when you shut it so you can pee and cry. Rainbow flowers bloom on your neck your arms your breasts your inner thighs, but he kisses the flowers away with gentle tears. You know the pressure of his forehead on your belly, his arms tight around your waist as he kneels and apologizes and tells you things. His devotion is an incandescent bulb always on and radiant with heat. You no longer feel your hands, so you wouldn't know if this is love or arson. During You are a basement with a long blue couch and no windows. You are heartbeat, a thunderous drum. You are shallow breath and stiff muscles. A blue couch cushion pressed down and down. His hands and his knees. You are wait. You are stop. You are your words lost in his mouth—breathed in, chewed up, swallowed down. You are his fingers. You are wait. You are stop. You are the sound of him. You are red light behind your eyes. You are it. You are tag you’re it. You are full of worms and dirt and him. You are nothing. You are a percussion instrument. Dark light bulbs. A ceiling fan with still blades. You are white noise. You are his toothy smile. You are the wallpaper train circling the crown molding. A boxcar with open doors and no cargo. After Days later you take your first shower, if standing still under hot water counts as trying. You tilt your head so the stream runs into your ears and you hear only breath and heartbeat. You do not wash yourself: he stole your hands: now every touch is his. You set the tap as hot as you can stand and once the heat stops hurting you turn it up again and again and when you can't make it any hotter, you make it icy cold. Repeat until you feel nothing not even the pulse of him or the water beating your skin. You wish you could do something about the him on the inside.
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 Photo by Andrew Seaman on Unsplash I am at the point where it is hard to remember precisely when things happened. Or in what order. I am not good with dates, never have been, will over- or hugely under-estimate how long it has been since ______ . Even when the events were of great significance: A birth. A death. The day I met the person who is literally the most important individual in my life. They blend together, months and years, jumble around. Most often I recall a scent, or the weather that day, if there was snow on the ground yet or if we were wearing shorts. In real life things do not march in orderly lines toward their conclusions. Some effects have no causes, some causes no direct consequences. You let go of blame over time. This happened, and this, but one did not bring the other into being. Like husbands, arguments, kisses. Like departures that in retrospect seem just natural next steps in the walk of life. I carved a pumpkin out of habit, will hang up the stockings when the calendar says it is time. Were my parents still alive when my niece was born, the young woman who is now planning her wedding? I did not know about my ex-husband’s heart attack until months later. He could have died. But he didn’t. And I met him in the produce aisle one day by chance, heard the whole story. And then have not seen him once since. What are the odds for anything? Everything seems to happen at once, and I still wake up the next morning unprepared. I put a clock in every room, yet am surprised that the hands keep turning.
 Photo by Jorge Bermudez on Unsplash With every heaving breath Elpis took, I saw / god’s bet twinkling in her eyes. Her skin was / transparent—I could see each quiver of her pulse, each hiss / of her garden-snake veins—and I don’t know / if this is the perennial of God’s will but Mama told me / god’s angels have swallowed Elpis, leaving her / frostbitten. I still don’t know / what god Mama spoke of, but Papa says / Elpis is dying, he said her flesh would tighten around her bones /as her eyes sank and her legs crumbled. And I cried / I cried until my eyes rang bloodshot, the innocent glimmer / of Elpis between my matted lashes. Elpis, matted / with tears and a scream prying open my lips. / And slithering out my lips was the gutting sound of a mother losing / her firstborn daughter, of my pupils shrinking / back into my sockets and Elpis’s hands wrinkling my breath / and now when I put my palm in hers, my fingers interlace hers and I see / the prairies she never visited, the daisies and dandelions she braided / around her forearms, each petal falling with a beat of her heart. And underneath her glazed eyes, pink roses / swirling with the black rot as summer parasites blossom, blossom with the pain of a fresh bruise each time / I press it.
 Photo by Matthew Henry on Unsplash for Kate Suppose I stopped running from the walls of your overly decorated bedroom. Suppose I let your laughter twirl my hair, suppose I let my stomach knot, you lay bedridden blocks away, your heart readying to stop. Suppose I stopped running and let the soles of my feet bleed into the road’s endless tar, bordered by the blanket of grass fields. Suppose the silence of summer became too sweet to swallow, the puffs of breath clouding the air like caramel cigar smoke. Suppose I stopped running and filled your maple-soft hand with mine. Suppose your pulse slowed as mine quickened. Suppose your eyelids, touched by gravity, finally closed. Suppose I stopped running and October never ended and the orange and brown leaves clung to their branches and my tears clung to my eyes. Suppose I sat in the frosted grass and whispered in your ear and stared into your sea-black eyes. Suppose pain blessed my heart and my unfulfilled promises don’t hurt anymore. Suppose my words will float off this wrinkled paper and my rhymes will be silk. Suppose you hear me. But you don’t. So I keep running.
East Bay Times—July 5, 2021
At dawn, the sun is confirmed dead. Loss is heavy, eerie, foreign. Shoveling mounds of debris, oak, and rubble, I locate pieces of ruined porcelain—the head of Buddha, decapitated. I am learning how to mourn without tears the way my parents did after losing their home, their belongings in the Vietnam War, escaping by boat on hazardous seas, displaced and separated in refugee camps, immigrating to America with nothing but hope.
 Photo by Clarisse Meyer on Unsplash We fled under orders, tracking north along roads so new that the maps didn’t show them, sometimes so new that we had to lay them ourselves. Hardcore and tarmac. Burning palms blistering towards the Pole Star. We travelled by night and we travelled by day. We travelled by osmosis, by sleight of hand, and by a process akin to nuclear fission. We told no one our names, because names are power and we needed them to light our way, but we told ourselves lies to keep up morale and confuse the devil we knew was at our heels. At borders we became birds and rumours, and at rivers we became fish and superstitions. We fled under oath and never let ourselves down. Shadows sobbed as they took our hands. We fled under anaesthetic, and we still feel nothing but the dullest ache.
 I am 12 years old and I have a whistle for a front tooth. I am 12 years old and I learn about two girls who tricked the world into thinking fairies were real and I wonder how they kept their dresses so white. Young girls are strange things and young women are even stranger. I am 12 years old and I am a young woman. Two girls put pictures of fairies on hatpins and someone calls them a miracle. Two young women claim to commune with paper cut outs and someone calls them a “mental disturbance.” I am 12 years old and I am a mental disturbance. I am 12 years old and I begin to hope that the growing pains are just like coming home in a white dress with wet feet, that I am on the cusp of evolutionary perfection and my theosophical burgeoning is nothing but a lazy skipping of stones until something better happens to me. Two girls make a product of their potential, print it on glass plates and hold their tongues. I am 12 years old and there are grooves in my tongue for fingernails. I am 12 years old and I am learning to affix the smallest wings to my biggest lies. I am 12 years old and I am just doing what my foresisters did before me. I am 12 years old and two girls teach me how to replicate the prettiest parts of myself for maximum consumption. Amy Devine is an artist from a lineage of artists whose work has been featured in several publications including Orange Peel, Gems, and Beyond the Veil Press. She is based in Sydney, Australia and she is inspired by history and the narrative of humanity. Follow her on Instagram: @devineinspirational
dear dorothy, another temp record shattered today every afternoon almost unbearable here in late summer & not just from heat the ants & spiders & blackberry canes all creeping increasingly into our sanctuary indiscriminate in their efforts to multiply exponentially & we may call them invasive so eager always to claim ourselves the caretakers of this land a land for you & me it’s said despite our complicity in its partition & destruction indeed our own inheritance is invasion & we have never settled for less & how dorothy do i convince my neighbor of this? ~ dorothy, a new flag flies across the street. our community is full of them, each a sort of exclamation mark after the silence inflicted on us in the grocery store the clerk either stares wordlessly or scowls while they ring up our toilet paper & canned caffeinated sugar-free water & the vegetables & eggs & what offends them escapes me there is one flag which doesn’t fill my throat with dread across the street from the daycare but its solace is tempered by angry signs & slogans adorning many of the local homes & of course the pickup trucks with headlights that strip corneas bare or that sport steel testicles at the back end or pejorative decals about vegetarians & the sign nearest our home in the window of a man who flies the flag of the marine corps says make the liberals cry again & i wonder who it is they imagine crying because when my people cry it is often because one or more of us has in some fashion directly or indirectly been eliminated & what do the people praying for our blood lose in their defeat except pride & access to unfettered violence anyway we cannot fly a flag in answer or it might put our child in danger like every time we drop his other trans friend back home in her neighbor’s window the flag of the confederacy permanently displayed makes my blood rise my hand ache for a brick. ~ dottie, thinking about dying again feeling ridiculous you ought to see the puppy so tenaciously mischievous i can only wish i could ever be so uninhibited & yes this brings us to two dogs & three cats which brings us to two adult queers a queer child two dogs & three cats & i’m thinking about dying again i have a family & i’m thinking about dying again yesterday i felt jealous of roadkill on the way back from the ocean until upon passing i realized it was a backpack when you write will you tell me can a person who remains broken in the presence of purest love still be saved? ~ dot, can’t decide if we’ll sell this house of other people’s memories the indecision reminiscent of the back and forth of this country on whether personhood should apply to everyone & we’re likely screwed we can hardly afford to rent even in this town & it seems we’re unwelcome—too many manicured lawns presiding over stately homes with darkened windows who knows what goes on behind some of those what propaganda is digested nightly full of pundits passing judgment on people who dare defend free expression or even worse advocate for its expansion—might be a while before i write again my dear friend as it is nearly time for another election. Garnet Juniper Nelson is an androgyne birthed & corrupted in the American high desert who now writes from the Pacific Northwest. A graduate of the MFA program in creative writing at the University of Nevada, Reno, their work has appeared in publications such as Salamander, Waxwing, Poet Lore, Ninth Letter, Frontier Poetry, Salt Hill, and Pidgeonholes, and has received nominations for Best of the Net and Pushcart prizes. They currently teach writing at Centralia and Lower Columbia Colleges.
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