Celebrating Another Anniversary, June 6, 1891 Abby
A year past our twenty-fifth anniversary, Andrew’s face settles into a finer granite, boney as the roast I am cooking him for our occasion.
I wait until Emma and Lizzie are out of the house before I serve the food—
someone burgled us of late, and I give no kindness to his children, make them a bed of indifference,
because that was what Andrew showed me in the aftermath. How to lay a hand with heaviness, keep secrets
in the back of the kitchen where no one looks. Te sutures, coffin nails, buried fishing weights that hold a family together.
I am so tired. Andrew smacking his lips constantly, eyes roving through the house.
Even before the robbery, I sleep like an ex-lover, wake up panicked and afraid.
I reheat the food. I avoid the daughters when they call.
This selection comes from the book, Blood Box, available from Black Lawrence Press. Purchase your copy here! Our curator for this selection is Sarah Clark .
Zefyr Lisowski is a trans & queer Southerner, the author of Blood Box (Black Lawrence Press, 2019) and a Pisces. She’s a poetry co-editor at Apogee Journal and has received support from Tin House Writers Workshop, Sundress Academy for the Arts, The CUNY Graduate Center, and elsewhere. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Muzzle, DIAGRAM, Literary Hub, Nat. Brut., and the Texas Review, among other places. She’s currently working on Wolf Inventory, a collaborative film about ghost stories, ritual, and feminized sexual violence in the South, with filmmaker and artist Candace Thompson. Find her and more of her work online at zeflisowski.com.
Sarah Clark is a disabled non-binary Nanticoke editor, writer, and cultural consultant. They are Editor-in-Chief and Poetry Editor at Anomaly (www.anmly.org), Co-Editor of the Bettering American Poetry series (www.betteringamericanpoetry.com) and The Queer Movement Anthology (Seagull Books, 2021), a reader at The Atlas Review and Doubleback Books, and an Editorial Board member at Sundress Press. She curated Anomaly‘s GLITTERBRAIN folio (http://anmly.org/ap25-glitterbrain/) and a folio on Indigenous & Decolonial Futures & Futurisms (http://anmly.org/ap-27-indigenous-futures/), edited Drunken Boat’s folios on Sound Art, “Desire & Interaction,” and a collection of global indigenous art and literature, “First Peoples, Plural.” They were co-editor of Apogee Journal‘s #NoDAPL #Still Here folio, and co-edited Apogee Journal‘s series “WE OUTLAST EMPIRE,” of work against imperialism, and “Place[meant]“, on place and meaning, and is a former Executive Board member at VIDA. Sarah freelances, and has worked with a number of literary and arts publications and organizations. www.twitter.com/petitobjetb
