Author Archives: Qu Literary Magazine

It was the night of the Worm Moon,
low and full in the March sky, though
we couldn’t see it, not under
our wool blanket of clouds. You
were standing at the counter cutting
vegetables when I offered you two
paper cranes — folded triangles

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The way my mother tells it,
I ran away. She didn’t shove me
out the front door at sixteen.
Afterwards, she remembers my little sister
possessed by a poisonous anger
but has no recollection of dragging her
through the house by her hair.
The history of our family was oral,
repeated to herself
in the splotched bathroom mirror,
where everything came out backwards.
Backwards everything came out
of that mirror, where she repeated
our family history, with no recollection
of dragging my sister through the house
by her hair, of her own poisonous anger, or me
at sixteen, pleading at our front door.
She didn’t shove me.
I ran away.

Sword in the bonestone. Blade rhumb lining the tongue. I
was really sick but didn’t know it. One by one the
acupuncturist tlcks out the rostrum-like pins—forehead
cheeks chin—save for the splinter embedded in the
meridian of my soft spot, crown of the governing vessel.
Monster irresistible like the rhinoceros. Spiny spiky anteater.
Hedgehog cousin. Half-squamate, half-woman dwelling in a
cave no outside world’s iron age pierces. When I press the
antenna hidden in my skull the mind’s long lists of past due
& to do & will it so. When I press harder that axis of a planet
yet discovered: blood temples; glass blowing nerve hiss; salt
of tinnitus. Harder still—a jet shatters the sound barrier of
retrograde amnesia, a bolt of lightning fernseeds dream into
channels. Like a finger in the dam or a cork in the socket,
it’s the plucking out of the stoppering—not the arrow
spearing the heart—which kills you

When the sea breeze makes its way inland
through all of the cranes & concrete forms

of downtown, past the new floor-to-ceiling
windows, & in amongst the suburbs’ shadow

box fences, I watch the palm fronds behind
my computer monitor alternate between

a mild daze-like sway & orgasmic tremble.
Sometimes I fantasize about what a release

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Rub her tiny protruded belly in circles
and the sin will crawl out, fill a room

like prayer. Her first word is mine.
Do not let her use your heart

as a tool. You cannot take body
from her. You must keep her

alive, let her fatten up like a little disaster.
Under her coiled ribs beats a new tender

plan. If you bend deep enough

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What lives in the laboratory of the body
was cradled in someone’s hand
Look, they said and the thing
wet, translucent, glowing,
pulsed like the inside of a firefly
essential inner matter, vital, alive
in someone’s hand in a hallway