
This selection, chosen by Managing Editor Krista Cox, is from She by Theadora Siranian, released by Seven Kitchens Press in 2021.
Gala and the Tigers
All the airplanes are disappearing. With their thin seats and bright engine lights they take off into the woodchipper grinding away outside my window. I lie in bed and listen to them go. Something is not one thing but an unwinding set of lines tracing a perpetual lack of comfort, the sweater snagged, what people avoid calling the eventual, the world growing smaller as it grows larger. The silence of those back bedroom days becoming less violent, but more threatening. All those notes taped to the kitchen cupboards no longer encoded—the weather of broken ribs and genetic discontent now formulas for sadness and grocery lists, almanacs for snowfall and heat. A room built of acid and honey, an iron cage strewn with irises: watching someone lost grow old. The waves look like wounds from 17,000 feet, sinew of salt and motion. In the dream it’s morning and I find her. Ten floors down, naked, a giant stretched out in the parking lot. The animals are gone, her skin shredded, her body finally void of complexities. Death aesthetic and austere, the body, this moment, just another in a long collection of artifacts missing their middleground, and here, see: a pomegranate sliced open in the palm of my hand.

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