so the headlines crescendo on until the line
breaks into a frenzy. like the dead women

gutted by soft hands that held the
pink ink of passports

and won with faces pale as bellied cod,
i can wrap my mouth around

your words like any outliver,
but here's the truth:

you split my country open
& ask me to beg for forgiveness.

like a good supplicant whose legs were used
to kneeling in the cold translucence of history,

these bruised faces glimmering back
in black and white & red and yellow

as if rusting down the begotten
vengeance of god.

god, what good are we if not taxidermied with shame,
this memory you sever from the land

like a gangrenous limb. this city greased with ink
gnawing down the bodies.

listen: i have seen the pulse
of a wound before mending

and it beats like spring. my mother's mother's
mother watching you leave

to the other maps you had butterflied
where the shallow graves stood like hallmarks

& does it jump up your throat, the way the haunting
in your mansion uncoils to the fate of a gambler.

the old man had so much blood in him
that the iron is still in the ground,

& the sun is unpeeling the dusk
from your best journalism

& it's leaping out like new
frogs in spring, this umbilical

pestilence. even god could only walk
into this present tense. After a few months, solitude softens the meat
of your body into motherhood

and you rock this newborn quiet into
absence every morning.

You do this dance because loneliness
is a domestication of light,

a coaxing out of the sun:
your room flustered with shadows.

To tread on gentle grounds
means filing down its teeth.

The open-faced surrender of nerve endings;
the lullabies you sing yourself to sleep.

Then, heaven leaks in, not the one-man
religion you drown yourself with,

but the exit wounds of traffic
lights, hungry as a chef.

They push the glass carcass from your arms,
an arsonist of frozen lakes, and you grieve from the mountain top

because briefly, flight is gravity in mourning,
because briefly,

you unwound the dance, spinning like
a plastic soldier down the coffee table,

down the war-torn country of your
fingerprints, warm like a church,

and now you see blues marrying
into the baked concrete of this city

the way bronze effigies do,
losing their bargaining with time.


Angela Sun is a writer from Scotland with a degree in Evolutionary Biology. Her hobbies include guitar playing and arguing about the practical applications of her degree. You can find her work in Heavy Feather Review, Squawk Back, and the Hyacinth Review. You can find her on Twitter @blessphemey.