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Picture
Picture
Picture
Shell / Texture / Stroking / Almost
For reference I       create shade and shape
                                                                       to discover which body is the frame

Breathless in the way her belly slumps at the hips. 

In that old bicycle landscape a beach appears. 

Give me your face, please. 

I hover around it
and she around the edges lightly touching

The belly diagrams itself like a helipad        the downward stroking triangle

She tells me a story and I
                                          remember it as if it belongs to me 

Attempting to dry myself on the astroturf porch. How to catch a crab and put it to sleep. 

She slants down like the ceiling above the stairway, then vanishes     triangular

I’m mothering. 
                                                    How to be a soft touch. 

Red nail polish spilled on the porch is no matter     no matter, a card table stretching into a pier

What is behind the dulled back door. 

Careful to look between the kicking legs of the crab 
for the emergence of lullaby

What is behind the face I find familiar

Imagine the angle of a box lid closing over me as I lounge among the toys.

After several years my memory acquires grain
                                                                          to incorporate the age of the photos

An even tan in black and white. Each tendril of her bathing suit top folds over like the ear of a retriever, like a harlequin’s costume, like I’m listening up against a collarbone. 

If a body appears only once in a landscape. 

A crease from hip to hip, another and another meeting between the legs

I refuse to put it away


What you say is impossible because the body is always in the landscape.

In the Bath House, Without Glasses

In the one wet room      in our skin        singular among the tiles

One bath is hot. One bath is cold. One line of water breathes down from the tiled ceiling. 

Once upon a time I opened 

my eyes inside your body. 


            Gently feeling around the grouted edges. 


She put me in the bath with my cousins, where
            the Yiddish for vagina is very similar to puppy. 

I lie down on the wet table to be scrubbed
                           talked about in another language
new-bellied

We flopped around in the water with our washcloths and shampoo bottles. 

She’s always a body in the room, careful and clean. 

I can’t see anything but the surface of the water 
just in front of me / and even then, it laps clear through the tiles

                    If I were allowed to be tattooed       it would be mostly letters
                                                                                   like markers in the cemetery


This one I lost / This one / Usually one body in the room
at least belongs to me, but
it separates


In the other room, the men bury themselves in hot salt. 

                                             It was traditional to go to the mikvah
but those buildings are all churches now. 

She’s laughing at me in another language / unable to breathe 
in the steam I know my
skin is around here somewhere

            Near the strange edges of my thighs

                        I’m just a frame stretched over the table for cleaning

She all has dark hair and wide hips, a blur of shape and shadow, slipping around from body to body.

Is this even my shampoo bottle?

Whatever. 

Someone empties a bucket of cold milk over my face.
Picture
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  • HOME
  • WINTER 2022 ISSUE
  • SUBMISSIONS
    • Submission Form
  • ABOUT
  • LITTLE BLACK BOOK
    • A NOTE FROM THE EDITORS
  • SHOP