Summoning Sore
For days, I have eaten coals
straight out of a rich man’s fire.
I take a piece of the devil
(not in the Roman sense),
and pop it in my mouth
like a little shoe.
I taste vengeance, I justify,
it tastes like shit, I admit.
No thing burns to ash here.
My hands can do no harm.
For a few days, I’ve slept in
a bathtub of utility blades.
I wake with unpunctured skin,
just something like a gill
above my kidney. My fingers slide
and feel Death’s wet face
engraved on a lacquered stone.
Ántonia is a poet and artist from Baltimore, MD. Her work has appeared in Poet Lore, The Fiddlehead, Los Angeles Review, and Hobart, among others. Her first collection, Self-Titled by Alien, was published by Milk Carton Press in May 2022. Hanif Abdurraqib described STBA as “a brilliant, expansive, and experimental collection of word that is not afraid to be playful --- in form, in language, in its vision for a world beyond flawed and faulty binaries. This is a book that sent me to a glorious future.”
Other Works
The Frosted Glass Pane
by J.F. Gleeson
... There was a man, I believe at least, who would stand on the other side of the pane of frosted glass ...
Threads
by Anne Noonan
... Create a believable narrative weaving together the following elements ...