
dead things
- what do you do with dead things?
do you let them linger around your life?
do you hold onto them for fleeting comfort?
i mean, fuck,why not?
it was all downhill from there anyways
- no matter how deep i manage to breathe
how many times i pinch myself
i’m yet another dead (alive) thing
one who can’t deal with myself
so i beat things into a bloody mess
- this just can’t be me
oh, but it really is me
right at the core it is me
a sloppy mess
a newly revived thing
someone who is an almost impenetrable wall
a dead (alive) thing
This selection comes from the book, The Chosen One, available from Animal Heart Press. Purchase your copy here! Our curator for this selection is Sarah Clark.
Vanessa Maki is a writer, artist & blk feminist whose work has appeared or will appear in various places. She has self-published chapbooks & currently has three coming out in 2020: the chosen one (Animal Heart Press) , sweet like limes (Bone & Ink Press) & decayed state (marlskarx).
Sarah Clark is Editor-in-Chief and Poetry Editor at Anomaly, Co-Editor of 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’s edited folios for publications, including Anomaly‘s GLITTERBRAIN folio and a folio on Indigenous & Decolonial Futures & Futurisms, Drunken Boat’s folios on Sound Art, “Desire & Interaction,” and a collection of global indigenous art and literature, First Peoples, Plural. Sarah freelances, and has worked with a number of literary and arts publications and organizations.