Karissa Morton Calor
Restless daughter, blood building to lace on her chest / lungs, joints choked with fear. Father pulls her from bed to floor, body limp with heat— / To watch him carry her to the tub, water parting gently against her back / this girl so small, waiting for a breath to snag on swollen tongue. He wraps her in t-shirt cocoon / ribs & skin clenched hard against the curve of his arm / slides her into the backseat. Silent, he stares in the rearview. She trembles, father's own weak growth. / The lights feel like fire, she tells him in the ER, dark eyes tiny ships in the black. He lifts styrofoam to fever-burned lips once bottle-fed / remembers how they used to hold his pinky in their grip. His half-conscious prayer of faith— / she lies stuck through with needles, tourniquet-bound elbows / like Saint Sebastian, this volley of arrows, this slow martyrdom to the world.
White Squall
The mind, she says, is a glassy thing, like the light
of hands & knees, like the bucking wave of hip.
I ask her if this is desire, this need to be endlessly
changed, this sweet unanswered, these organs fallen
from perch of cloud. She sighs, tells me I've fallen into myth,
that I've become an immovable wreck, an erotic sadness.
Over & over, I do this—I craft my shame into lust,
sky sticking to my fingers like tiny gods,
little barely-theres pulsing against my breast.
& yes, I understand: these are the sounds of cracking ice,
the glows of maps built on air, each one telling me
I am the pollen-bathed body & he the unforgivable man,
land & water falling as he opens his jaw.
I am not always thinking about this.
I am not always a prisoner in my blue egg,
but tonight—tonight is the night of loss,
the night of flowers
with no windows to mask their stench.
Alarm Lines
Spiders think only of war & release—
that's what it's like to be empty, cut
straight through like old citrus. They
gather straw to make hats & bullets,
as if these things will shield them
from a cemetery of children, flashlight
beams dividing the night with lemon.
They may or may not be aware of
the soldiers buried in the heart of that
fruit, their leathery arms faded out,
just nails & eyelids & dirt. For spiders,
life coordinates around this lemon,
its seeds scattered in something like
the texture of silk. There, resisting
hunger looks a lot like living the night
of the young, swathing band
wrapped tight around its rind.
KARISSA MORTON is
originally from Des Moines, Iowa, and currently lives in Denton, Texas. Her recent
work can be found in Indiana Review, Guernica, The Paris-American,
Sonora Review, and Crab Orchard, among other places.
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