A touch of your skin,
A coin in hand, you take
My heart from the market.
[Image Description: Various equations are written in UV reactive green ink on a black background with UV purple lights affixed above.]
“Being rational, but discrete, he divided me. Advanced curriculum, my bell curves skewed, and he transformed the mean. No longer prime, I wished him imaginary.”
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[Image Description: A frozen lake, it’s icy surface broken in variously sized shards, with dark blue water flooding in between.]
Let Zoë Bracken’s quiet lyricism draw you into an intimate world of longing and revel in the natural images she paints with words.
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[Image description: blurry photograph of a wooden staircase. The entire image is toned red.]
It was only about the connection, he says. A reflection
an echo, a mannequin
You wake the wolf in me
if I let her take over
well, there’d be only shreds
Sometimes I want to cry when I think
About how content you’ve become with
Mediocrity.
[Image description: close photograph of the vapour rising in swirls from a cup of hot liquid.]
how do you smell like home?
does your pulse quicken?
real women are polished opals.
i am buried coal.
You are a thief of my flesh; you split me like plum leaves
too early in the spring. Disrobed of what protects me;
one silver necklace undone, cotton to the floor.
Before you I am bare.
And Mina wonders whose fault this is, this eagerness to see her and judge her before she's even stepped off the plane.
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A rapid nib descends, amends once more
A pained farewell through piling drafts of irk.
If I believed in prophets
then my pilgrimage would have started
when I was eight years old.
does
exile
begin at birth?
When I met your bare skin with mine, innocently enough
- hands in passing, an arm brushing by -
the roar of my heart didn’t reach your ears.
I didn’t hear the beat of your footsteps hesitate outside my door,
the silence a question to which I did not answer
yes.
Midnights, you occasionally lingered
in my kitchen,
flicking cigarette ash in my sink
and sipping champagne
from my last plastic cup.