#memorious

[mortalpractice]

Minor Detail

It’s true I loved you best with a door between us, practicing the things women do with their hands. Months later I’m still bad at music, bad at onions bad at woman                                                     brief as the sun.

Inside the night

I finally unstring                              the instrument carefully strung.

                                                           All this time

I thought if I could see music I’d find you inside.

— Sara Elkamel, published in Memorious

[lifeinpoetry]

I was a woman, I suffered, I was there.

Yanyi, from “Eurydice at the Mouth,” published in Memorious

[bostonpoetryslam]

Tonight the rock formations will rise while I sleep. This one a conqueror. This one a monument to the hope of forgetting. Out in the field, the wheat stalks called your name. Your hand cupped listening to a rustling like the sea.

Cathy Linh Che, “We Begin in Joshua Tree,” published in Memorious

[mortalpractice]

Intimacy

On the morning of the new Q train, we passed a woman’s body slumped against a wall. White liquid poured from her mouth like snow, until the paramedics showed up, for which everyone was grateful. In my mind I was busy riding a Palomino through a forest, solving an equation in air. My thoughts hard & soft, a terrain. All week I wanted to talk to you about this small sad thing, the woman’s purse at her side, hands trembling like my horse at the stream while we looked & kept walking, these details, which make up a poem, a life, & could help you know me. All this time, I wanted you to understand the emptying in me, below the earth, where someone was singing.

— Jen Levitt, published in Memorious

[mortalpractice]

Desire made a door of me and I kept it ajar.

Sarah Ghazal Ali, from “Aurat,” published in Memorious

[lifeinpoetry]

At times around him I felt I had / died inside my unsureness.

Nathan Blansett, from “Provenance,” published in Memorious

[sleepingpoetry]

Naïve with sweetness, the bees hive-crowd: sugar swarm the maraschino factory, siphon redness like a sunset until zaftig—honeystomachs lining silk with cordial as we triage for backrooms where we can slough off wintering: feed our own bodies so full with blood and bees that we might re-dress ourselves in the welting. Skin-close or closing: thrum like a barebulb-light; the sudden tightness of teeth next to teeth. Dear red wet match-sting in our mouths, taste we’ve been tendering-for. How speech is a pheromone that incites the alarm. And our throats—: as closed as cherries. As undivine. No grief in the swelling. In the numb bulbs left to be carried off from the hive. Such a crushed and candied liqueur: husk of bees and us, almost unrecognizable in the plush housing of dyes— blushed to a fevering, garmentless.

– Cori A. Winrock, Anaphylaxis as Apotheosis