Vanishing Act
- Jun 26, 2020
- 1 min read
by Madison Zehmer
the decay of her december will lurk until I take my breath and burn it dead, lips raw, busted nerve on gravel.
snowstorms eat my lungs blue.
flakes dissolve, bleed tongue saliva sick. I let floodwater loose in shivering ground, turn spiderlilies into fume.
I’ll call this what it is,
expose bone, take a look. fragile as windstorm, fingerprints ignite negative space, shell of air eviscerated.
I dissect what was, what’s
gone; I pull apart oxygen, memories of flesh, of smog. a postmortem prayer turns skin into shame. I scrape cells
into starmatter, fold
belly into air, zero-sum. sun-ignited, I scream at a God who knows how to forget, and all I hear back
is her voice, moss-song smooth.
I submerge it in pondwater, let algae grow strong between its pauses, until it is home, until it is mine.
Madison Zehmer is a poet and wannabe historian from North Carolina, living in NYC. She has published and forthcoming work in Gone Lawn, Drunk Monkeys, LandLocked Magazine, and elsewhere. Her first collection will be released Summer 2020 by Another New Calligraphy.
