Samples

Yoke

after Kim Addonizio

 Around my neck there are shackles singing,
or screaming, rather. It repeats and repeats
until it rings like tinnitus in the deep cylinder of my ear.

My horns curl back toward my temples,
thinned at their tips, not yet brittled,
reaching out past my eye like mother hands.

Crafted of keratin and blood,
stinging anvil in my stressed nostrils —
I want to return to the lee of her

placenta. Not next to my mother, harnessed,
yielding this wagon forward.
Shoulders raped by hot metal. Not anticipating

my own blood shed as bursting scalp carves
pathways to my myringa. Anything to escape
this clinking, this awful sound.

Monstrum   

“From the Latin root monstrum, a divine messenger of catastrophe, then adapted by the Old French to mean an animal of myriad origins: centaur, griffin, satyr.” —Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous 

She likes to vanish

under the haze of perfume, tequila,

and sweat in the gay club, dizzying

her eyes into a single portal            

at the center of her slick forehead.

Cascading over her backside,

I become twice the girl I ever wanted to be, 

doubling over her ribcage,

so the vertebrae would remember

her wings. Annexed in her glittering skin, 

my nails mar the horizon line 

between us, the strobe gliding 

off our shared silhouette, 

unsexing us into Pegasus.

We swap saliva and clumsy nicotine 

between our painted lips, 

fill our lungs 

with lyrics like a ventilator.

You can find us girls

air-light as a wraith. A bokeh 

too kaleidoscopic and cognate to bottle.

Our dancing ghosts will corrode here, 

or wash away with the closing lights,

blurring us into a morning contusion.