A Cure For The Water Trapped Inside Your Body Death will not undo the frayed seams that cinch my waist or stand above me in the light to better watch my mouth slacken; the ceiling fan revolving in my damp eyes, their pupils like an axis for the turning spokes. I remember the weight of those small, brittle bones like broken eggshells in my hands– something that can’t withstand even the force of being fit back together: the window box flowers collared in white eyelet cotton, pleating to foetal buds again when the sun starts to set and the scarecrow casts the shadow of the cross– cutting across my path as though what was seeded in this plight could never rise above it; my stomach a globe of tears, the room’s reflection frozen in the mirror of a clean knife curved like a scythe to fit the hollow of the swell. We made graves for each of your sorrows in the folds of my abdomen once, buried too close to the surface so that in years of famine the small mounds rose up, embossed like braille across my stomach. I didn’t think of it for years, pacing unlit rooms flicking my butane lighter to watch the shadows break up and scatter like insects, disappearing into cracks in the drywall or shivering in corners, waiting for me to put it out. Sometimes I traced the planes of those hard, formless things inside me and wondered if I’d stayed with you too. If the shame that spread over everything I touched still coats your body like a milky thrush: your hands braced forever in the doorframe; every thrash and heave of the dog-toothed sea still rolling in the whites of my eyes.

Birch When you left I found a book on the shelf full of drawings of birds. I cut them out with my scissors thinking I would make you a halo if I could teach them to circle your forehead. I closed my eyelids with masking tape and walked with my arms stretched out into the wind-snapped firs and the white trunks of birches, convinced that I could find you if you thought I wasn’t looking, still sitting cross-legged somewhere catching moths with the flame of your butane lighter. ©Kelly Rose Pflug-Back