First time I put high octane on my tongue bottle read Everclear. Put my eyes on God, then opened my throat like I was trying to swallow them stars. It’s a big ass sky. Bigger than a handle bottle, but you put handle after handle over your […]
After Pieter Brueghel’s “The Fall of Icarus” and W.H. Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts” Just hours ago, I found you ashen and cold on the floor of your sun-swaddled room, the needle beside you as splendid in design, as lethal in misuse, as Icarus’s waxed wings. […]
You watch him sizing up the threat. This stranger sweats inside your bedroom Where eaves have buzzed for weeks. Too quiet. You watch him, sizing up the threat. He eyes your framed certificate. So you’re a black belt? No one’s home. You watch him sizing up the threat. […]
Eat more, daughter. More A mouth without a stomach I clamp my teeth against the hand that tries to feed me Stubborn hangar and the airplane refused a short and slender spoon Eat daughter. Survive the life you never wanted. The spoon waits at […]
they say we’re married to dirt, ground-bound & sure to bend. break these bones & call us a miracle, kiss our feet then call us backward. sisters, when will we braid our hair despite their songs? i gather seeds from alluvial beds, save tamarind peels & […]
I am one of the good girls. Boys come back to school with new rodeo buckles and like any good girl I admire the hips circled in the silver hooves of bucking broncos. I bleed discretely. I cry properly when a girl drowns in the dam’s lake. The […]
Throughout the school play, I wonder where all the holy women are and why holy men are so abundant. We all start off female in the womb. And as a girl, I want to be holy, too — a Chosen One, enchanted by God. Without […]
–“Witch hunts are attempts by men to denounce the ritual knowledge of women and link it to evil.” -Witches, Tea Plantations, and Lives of Migrant Laborers in India: Tempest in a Teapot by Soma Chaudhuri I remember you insisted : the sacred grove virile, no place […]
Sasha Steensen is the author of four books of poems, most recently House of Deer (Fence Books) and Gatherest (Ahsahta Press). She has published several essays, including “Openings: Into Our Vertical Cosmos,” which can be read as an online chapbook by Essay Press at www.essaypress.org/ep-40. She teaches […]
I ignore it. Wearing my brother’s middle school blazer under my coat, I’m in a heady fog of mothballs. I feel pockets of spitballs and crumpled notes. The priest took notes the other day because he didn’t know my brother. Isn’t it like some shooting gallery target riddled […]