or girl, or wounded girl, or branches
grown from head and spreading — time
after time you have swallowed the
hunger, which is to say: yes it’s still
spreading — a diligent sandstorm & win
wind & winnow — your saltwhite
shoulders & bearable neck — a memory
stuffed into earth & coming up myrtle, the
lesser periwinkle — fresh as a wound, &
an ocean’s soft boundaries — like
touching blood means you’ve touched
what caused it — affect vs. affection —
love has to to do with the hands & the
mouth — it all feels blue velvet, a little
pretty at first then too much too much —
you were hungry & they called you a
monster — you found a kitchen with only
bitter apples — grapefruit & sand
cherries, colocynth & the rinds of oranges,
wet as the light caught in your hollow
branches — the use of your body is its
humming when windstruck — the same
familiar fear — the dream where they
leave you at the gas station & your
basement floods with oil — noon’s small
hour & its passage — enough light to
bleed by, enough blood to go on living —
haunches sun stroked fade with time, &
darkness has its wild & wily uses — they
harvest your branches & call you a
carnivore — I call you a feeling — or else
— another word for
–
A.D. Lauren-Abunassar is an Arab-American writer who resides in Pennsylvania. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Moth, Zone 3, Cincinnati Review, Diode, Comstock Review, Berkeley Poetry Review, and elsewhere. She was a 2019 Frost Chapbook Prize semi-finalist, a 2019 Pablo Neruda Poetry Prize finalist, and a 2018 Best New Poets anthology nominee. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.