Isabella Liu
vengeance.
eggshell teeth & bloodied lips. there were boys who stole swan eggs from the lake nest & crushed them with their palms. pith & yellow liquid & thirst quenching delicacy shoved down their throats like a shot glass. men of warriors & justice with their faces beet red saying this is
it, this is how we are meant to live but what good comes from stealing offspring? shattering
frail eggs & drinking life like
whisky, like there’s no answer but violence. the swans cry at the sight of their empty nests & broken eggshells & the bloody remnants of what could have been their children. last week a boy was attacked by a swan for eating her children. he lost half of his right hand, eaten & swallowed by vengeance: a swan not beautiful
but bereaved, & cowering at night as the moon glides over her dead children, crushed
beneath her swollen feet.
autumn as a memory of an ex
last autumn we ambled through the corn fields at Smith’s Family Farm; a midwest staple of rural landscape &
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we drowned in the tall leaves / breathing in
woodchips & sawdust & smelling the rawness of crops.
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mud / caking my legs / your hand in mine as
we stumbled through the fields
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like a pair of intoxicated doves: flapping & chirping
& choking with laughter until my lungs swelled like
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bloated apples. i had always thought you looked best with short hair marveling at
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the way your hair threaded through wind
like a breath fogged in the throat of a bleating dove.
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Halloween is our anniversary &
we spent thirty-one days of autumn picking apples /
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husking corn / drinking cider until our throats hurt. we’d eat our hearts together & carve love onto our pumpkin-skin-flesh
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& i know that’s
what we could have been but
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now you’re growing out your hair &
i’m sitting in the kitchen: stripping ear after ear of
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corn until my skin grows fibers & i’m forming
a husk, waiting for you to grab me whole & raw & swallow me.