You approach and I offeranother girl’s name. Curtains, velvetand crushed, mostly closed. See it this way: coyote’s tooth danglingcoy from my locs.You approach (my hair draping, obscuring my face)and it falls Tonight, like disco lights, beckons my selfto myself. There’s just enough lightfor me.—from “Of Starshine and Clay,” Volume 64, Issue 4 . . .
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Passing through the yardChoked with thirsty grass,You might see the newestAdults huddled in tight circles. Never alone. The beast mother isAll they know. —from “Mother of Beasts,” Volume 64, Issue 4 (Winter 2023) Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.Good Advice About Bears came as a result of a guided meditation . . .
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In a quiet hall, beneath a church in Chicago’s West Side, too many of us stand in a circle and wait for introductions. Some with our headphones on, our fingers crossed. Others with our eyes on the trays of food. The radio on my hip burrs. Pitches. Hums. Condenses—until I can hear . . .
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Equal parts energy and mass, bodies are heldtogether by light. You learn how lightpollutes, dependent on its ability to scatter.The womb gets lighter with every daughteryou have and every daughter you don’t have.Those daughters weigh stones hand overfist before building them into your womblike a ballast or fallen wall.—from “I Ask My . . .
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The man who is about to ask you to marry him grabs the check from the little tin tray and slides the three fortune cookies toward you.“All yours,” he says. You grin and he grins back. Three years together, and you have your rituals, your routines. When you have pizza, he . . .
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She was considered beautiful in the eyes of the common man, but she believed her womanly seduction outweighed her beauty. Yet she would feel guilty as soon as she turned on her charm. First she would pretend she had done nothing wrong, but then she would be gripped by the cardinal sin . . .
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Much of what was happening around the world remained unknown to most people. The vast majority didn’t know anything about it or couldn’t decode the signs of this revolution. In the big cites, the fuses had been lit, and we could smell the sparks coming from Vietnam, the Prague Spring, Bolivia, Chicago, . . .
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Forough Hantooshzadeh Rakhshan believed no sins existed, unless a woman had committed one. That may be why her life had always progressed like a chain of dominos, invariably promising complete destruction with the fall of the first piece, after which she would have to build everything anew. Ever since childhood and into . . .
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After we make love, I think of the word obliterate how it means the destruction of something. I think hostile hands are everywhere. We should probably nail it all shut. I don’t have time to think back to the fourteenth century because too much is tangling roots this day and the day after.—from . . .
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When cleaved of their fur, rabbits look like they do not come from our planet. Perhaps they came to us, bare, from yours. Perhaps some of you came here with these creatures, their muscle and fat smooth around their lungs—the size of thumbs—and their eyes . . .
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