Back to Issue Thirteen.

Apocryphal Memory of the Night We Met

BY ELIZABETH ONUSKO

 

Energy can only be compacted to the point where
it starts to hate itself,

so I ran until I collapsed.
As I laid, panting, in the grass,

the sky darkened into a pond
pricked by constellations of koi gasping for air.

It looked as if they were praying to me, which was strange
because I also wanted answers. Trees palsied

though there was no wind. Beginnings often take
the form of tremors: foreshock, shaky hand,

contraction. Singing overlaid the rumbling,
which was seismic — the singing was really

screaming — if I were a stone,
the blows would have broken me open

and revealed a hollow lined with chalcedony,
startling us both.

Elizabeth Onusko’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Slice MagazineLinebreak, Vinyl PoetryThe Journal, Radar Poetry, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and Southern Humanities Review, among others, has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and has been featured in Verse Daily and Best New Poets 2015. She is the author of a chapbook, The Prague Winter (Finishing Line Press, 2013).

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