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issue 02.

three poems: After the Full Moon, an Egg Cracked Open / Self Half Seen / Between the Laundromat and the Nail Salon by Caitlin Thomson

12/24/2019

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After the Full Moon, an Egg Cracked Open​

​Alone on the boat deck I read
the falcon cannot hear the falconer.

The sound of water lapping against the boat,
the sound of memory erasing itself.

Below deck my mother cooked bacon,
my brother sung a 50-cent song to himself.

My father was silent, the dog snuggled
in his lap, a whimper away from sleep.
​
Men in white t-shirts approach us on a zodiac.
There were no falcons.
Italics From The Second Coming by W.B. Yeats.

Self Half Seen

There is a way to be alone,
that used to be a part of me.

I was made of solitude, mangos,
and wind through the hole in the eaves.

I never meant to meet my lover.

The person I was before, wild only in her late night
sleeplessness and coffee drinking ways.

That first winter was so cold, everything
we had thought about ourselves
was irrelevant to who we were becoming.

​Between the Laundromat and the Nail Salon

The stranger digs her elbow into my back. I am in pain
and paying for it, the shoulder muscles click and pop.
Unbalanced, she says, the Russian of her accent, rich.

As a child I imagined massages to be pleasurable, the kind
of luxury my mother would never reward herself with.

I only pay for one when migraines make me retch,
my shoulders roped together by invisible strings,
knotted like an abandoned necklace, my old landlord

managed to untangle while talking about advanced
mathematics. My husband tries to loosen the tightness
sometimes but he’s too attentive to my pain

to make headway. I let myself gasp with him.
With the stranger my lips are sealed, my fingernails

digging into my palm sometimes, invisible
under the blanket. A way to redirect focus.

The pain I give myself, always the most manageable.
When I first figured that out at nine, I bit
a canker sore into the side of my own mouth.
Picture

Caitlin Thomson

 is the co-founder of The Poetry Marathon, an international writing event. Her work has appeared in numerous anthologies and literary journals including: The Adroit Journal, The Penn Review, Barrow Street, and Radar.  You can learn more about her writing at her website.

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    Cover photograph by Keith Moul
    Here you will find dancers. Wild women. Mad women. Girls who are sad no longer. Doctors and texts and broken glass. Pieces of us. Parts of you. Welcome in.

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