POETRY

by Dina Folgia

if I leave my dad will too

hands clutch­ing bitter hand                               mis­er­able callouses

wrench­ing plugs from sockets                           the whole power strip

cling­ing mas­cu­line pieta                                   rhett and bonnie blue

death’s head pros­trat­ing                                at depression’s doorstop 

pinned wings                                                  and every­thing else too

thorax, anten­nae                                                 legs, proboscis 

insec­toid prox­im­i­tas               elec­tric bug zapper

flu­o­res­cent like lamps               damp­ened for weeks

whole limbic     annihilation

ashes and casket   side by side

arms cir­cling grave­stones   the bases of trees

des­per­ate­ly seizing forewings         and hindwings

all the things we’d ever need                             to go

she, perihelion

instead of physics I’ll raise you strata, some­thing to keep you inter­est­ed in the layers of her atmos­phere when word of our heat doesn’t sustain you—we endotherms, exalted shiv­er­ers, always soft, eking closer to dark­ened sunspots—fissure freck­les across damp shoul­der blades, dual imprints of neptune freed from dis­tance, begging new proximity—she’s close enough to call sol, or some­thing brighter even, some­thing base, made of ele­ments far enough flung to resist organic repli­ca­tion— you may think us shame­less to seek some godless corner of the uni­verse, a place where we can lay dark and dormant, where our voices can’t be picked up on radar—I’d argue there is no place for peace, no space that has not been col­o­nized by the­ol­o­gy, by the far reaches of raphaelites, no galac­tic bed to worship our trajectory—entropy isn’t every­thing, not when there really isn’t much of a dif­fer­ence between hot and cold, not to starry fin­ger­tips trav­el­ling across eons, trying to figure out why they can’t feel snow anymore—my ill hands become sol­stice, her stable love, return­ing each year to see what fruit can be wrought from that cosmic spring—what makes a wan­der­er but need, that orbital pull of anti­mat­ter to star bodies to outer crust, seeking quarks where they sprawl dif­fer­ent, in ham­mocks of flesh not unlike our own—you would think space lonely, but I call it ours   this place between planets         free from sonder.

hatshepsut

before I smile for you

I have to be buried

woman’s mouth walled

embalmed waking

they removed my organs

early to make room

for my silence

I do not fear the tomb 

for I was born squealing

interred in expectations

female melan­choly

is an ancient practice

kohl x marks on 

unfet­tered cheeks

little girls can only 

run in the afterlife

tear up their skirts

show gods their ankles

the eternal playtime

of too-young queens

purer in passing

than child­hood

lay me damp before I go

let me rest in the only

place I have built

for myself

I want to find a reason

that is not birth sleep

or bent weeping

to rest supine

grant me a grin

right­ful­ly mine

This story orig­i­nal­ly appeared in Stonecoast Review Issue 17.

Photo by Joshua Woroniecki.