they said my great-grandmother
taught herself to read by whispering
hymns backward into a jar.
kept snakes in the stove,
sucked pennies clean for luck.
the men said she was feeble.
the women said, nervous.

i chew the same rhythm into my sleeves.
rub the fabric raw until my hands forget
the weight of being witnessed.
this is how i pray,
in repetition, in retreat,
in the hum behind electric things.

in my uncle’s trailer
there’s a buck head nailed to the fridge
and a child’s drawing of a sun
with no face.
my cousin says i blink wrong,
like a deer deciding whether to bolt.

my mother once locked me in a linen closet
because i wouldn’t stop spinning.
said she couldn’t take it anymore,
the noise, the flapping, the bright
click of me not being
like the rest of them.

when i came out,
i spoke in color
for three straight days.
she burned my drawings in a metal bowl
and told god to come collect me
if he had the stomach for it.

they call it a spectrum
but in this house it’s a curse,
a bloodline of girls who look away
when spoken to,
who name their toys after latin verbs,
who learn affection
by studying taxidermy.

the living room smells like mildew and lilac.
granny’s perfume still haunts the upholstery.
they say she went silent for twenty years
and came back speaking perfect French.
i understand.
sometimes you have to leave language
just to survive it.

i sit on the porch and stim
with a pop tab and a dead wasp.
my cousin’s boy says
i’m touched by something evil.
i tell him
so was christ.

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Header photography and artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson

The young man at the next table is evangelizing
to another young man.
He is arguing we might live in a simulation.
Something about light not behaving intuitively.
He’s on to Lazarus and The Screwtape Letters now. 

And I didn’t bring my headphones.

Outside, I watch boys hang loose as marionettes
on a dying earth beneath a dying sun.
And I worry about war and fundamentalism.
I’m sick of dialectic dialogue.

The young man has moved on to talking about Fight Club
(which is something you’re not supposed to talk about),
misquoting the book and film,
talking about a purposeless struggle.

And I marvel at a belief system cobbled together 
hodge-podge from religious texts and pop culture.
Probably not so unlike my own.

Of course you are here.
I don’t have my headphones to block you out.

Well, you aren’t here-here (I mean, could you imagine?),
but you’re here the way I don’t notice my legs until they ache,
or my stomach until I am hungry, or my heart until it’s breaking.

You are hiding in every poem I write and every story I tell,
every journal entry and not far from every thought.
(God, now he’s talking about love and his divorce 
and I feel pangs of sympathy and guilt.)

He says to the other young man:
Let me ask you this.
Let me ask you this.

But the questions are all rhetorical,
simply there to further his points.

I sip the weakest tea I’ve ever had and it hurts my stomach
as bad as the sympathy and guilt,
but the barista said she’d try better if I wanted a refill
and I’m trying not to be rude.

And of course you are here.

Textured tile covers the face of the coffee bar
and it looks inside out the longer you stare at it,
like an idea, like a simulation of a coffee bar.

And there is a father playing Go Fish with his daughter
trying to ignore the young man talking now
about the difference between the sexes
and how dating is really like sales if you think about it.

And of course you are here.

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Header photography and artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson

I asked you about the novel you were reading
and realized too late I was flirting,
despite wearing an oversized nautical sweater
and a fanny pack designed to carry
a child around my postpartum fat.

You were playing Pavement
but didn’t know the band,
and I forgave that,
looking in your pretty face as you said witchy playlist,
feeling that sense of undeniable possibility,
and underneath, the scintillating savor
of my own internalized shame.

It’s what we all dream of, right?
Witchiness, which means
taking ourselves to the forest to dance naked
away from laundry and picking up
countless old socks and half-full Coke cans—
in other words, away from men.

I’m sorry for my fantasies
of a wife, girlfriend, women,
when I outlive my husband,
sorry for breaking the illusion
when he came in with his beard and his requests,
his sense the world was made for him,
and asked to use your restroom,
to which you said no.

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Header photography and artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson

Texas women love and curse with a fatal bless your heart. Sun-burned plains enclose them, their multi-colored bodies corralled

in branded jeans. Tender cuts on man-sized platters piled high to heaven with heaping sides of disrespect, they live to be consumed and then discarded 

like Porsha Ngumezi. Doctors wouldn’t scrape her womb and she bled out, screaming, young and Black. No charity for her, she left this world in Houston

just like Josseli Barnica, who died while Catholic and brown. The green card in her purse meant life but not liberty because heartbeats from a dying fetus mean a one-way

trip to glory. Nevaeh Crain, pretty white girl with a butterfly tattoo in a sundown town, could tell you that, if sepsis hadn’t starved the pink from all her organs.

Meanwhile hypocrites under Hippocratic oath cull women’s bones to pick their teeth in self-congratulation because in Texas, praise Jesus, the right to life abides.

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Header photography and artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson

If ever someone attempted to strike fear into your heart,
I sense disappointment would follow. The traces you leave behind
prove your valor: back torn open, wings emerging. You fly
toward a setting sun, an aroma crisp and bitterly sweet in your wake.
Though men may try questioning you as they quake 
in your presence, you remain untouchable. The sweetness of cherry
couldn’t satisfy you; you sought the tangy taste of acid and reminded 
the woman following behind you, waiting to do life’s most vulnerable deed,
that she, too, could know what it means to be invincible, if only she lifted
the bacteria-laden stick sitting atop the aluminum dispenser, if only she 
took a risk and raised each tiny organism you left behind to her lips.

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Header photography and artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson

Because only a woman could endure
such atrocities to her crust,
gutted inside out for the pleasure
of man and still be expected to
make him breakfast in the morning.

Only a woman could be told
her rotting flesh is a result of
her own flow and ebb, that her
salty waves are self-inflicted,
too sensitive, too soft, too
easy to get a rise out of.

But it isn’t her fault that her
body rejects your half-hearted
apologies, your paper straws dumped
in her stomach, a manufactured “forgive me”
while you pump her lungs with smoke.

She begged you to stop, sent you letters
of warning. Flames filled your cities,
winds ripped your homes from their
foundations. She fought so hard that
her skin cracked and she almost swallowed
you whole. And it still wasn’t enough.

Of course Nature is a Mother,
because only a woman could lose
the right to her own body and then
be condemned for giving birth
to the apocalypse.

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Header photograph and artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson

I touch the earth and find the ash of my mother’s hair, her breath curling into smoke, into a hymn she will never sing. The fire eats through my hands as if it knows my name as if it has waited for this moment to make a feast of my body. Everywhere I go, the animals keep my secrets. The birds stitch my grief into their wings, carrying pieces of what I can no longer hold. The snakes coil my sorrow underground, burying what I’ve begged to forget. Last night, the moon burned itself into the river, and I was there to watch it drown. Everything goes this way: the air, the body, the prayer we refuse to finish. The water cannot spit me out. It holds me as it holds the ghost of rain, turning my name into something heavy, something that sinks. I asked the water to name me, but all it gave back was silence, its voice caught in the belly of a fish long dead, long forgiven. The fire grows a mouth, and it sings my body into a psalm of smoke. I am nothing but what I’ve lost: a garden of teeth and a heart beating against the blackened wood. To live is to be buried in parts, to call each death by a different name. Here is the fire. Here is the water. Here, where the earth learns how to swallow me whole. This is what I know of living: the birds mourn another loss, the snakes keep their prayers, and the river, even in its rage, cradles me like something it forgot to destroy. 

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Header photograph and artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson

The week I resigned myself to break up with him, I had to wait until Thursday to tell him in person. There seemed to be an inordinate number of deer carcasses along roadsides that week, one especially haunting, its ribcage visible, most of the flesh having been consumed by vultures. The red sinews of each meat-lined rib were seering, vibrant against the dreary wet winter afternoon. I slowed the car as I passed, mesmerized, torso aching in response: a world in which people slow down to stare at a creature splayed open, exposed, one second living, the next devoured.

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Header photograph and artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson

I hold grievances grown so old they are
calcified, rounded, smooth-pearled possessions—
each tucked away in its own bitter sphere.
I know each by feel, by weight, by passion—
I know where they’ve been lodged and exactly 
why I keep them there. I’ve grown used to their
presence, to the collected gravity
of each and every ancient reminder
of who and what and why and when rotten
things happened. I’ve kept them all. Kept them all
this time. Felt their sharp angers dull, soften
into me, felt them become mutable
as I held them, shaped them perfectly.
And when I die I will take them with me.

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Header photograph and artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson