by not thinking too much about the sky, how pierceable, 
how perilous, flanked between terrestrial underpinnings 
and something called the ether. Things were either edible 
or they were less so, though almost all of it 
could be taken into the mouth. I’d see a dog and think 
“dead dog,” I’d think “alone” and feel 
the tweed of her pleated trousers, the heat I knew
inside them. Regardless of how tightly 
I was clutching my own hand, there was a skein 
of electrons separating us. I tried other hands. 
For action to occur, membranes must be breached, 
ideologies inserted. I wanted to want 
to stay alive even as my limbic lobe roiled 
with a wan slime that hoped otherwise. 
As both carrot and cart, I kept offering her my curve 
of hemline in the back corner of the wooded parking lot. 
In feverish stirrings of peripheral motion, flaxen leaves 
eavesdropped around us. We took turns
compacting topsoil as nature continued 
to quietly transform back into itself. 
After, there were no birds, only serrations of blank 
left behind from their voltas, the branches jerking
in the quick vacuum, and we, turning,
were just in time to see the evergreens 
stir back into their stillness.

Published May 2nd, 2021

Marti Irving is a poet, bead enthusiast, and Programs Assistant at Poets.org. Their poems have appeared or are forthcoming in No, Dear Magazine and Vagabond City. Raised in the Pacific Northwest, they now live in Brooklyn with three black cats.

Vinna Begin is an artist born in West Java, Indonesia and based in Montréal, Canada. Begin earned a BA from Bandung Institute of Technology in Bandung, Indonesia and an MFA from the Academy of Arts University in San Francisco, California. Her work has been exhibited globally, including exhibitions in New York City, San Francisco, Montréal, and Seoul. More of Begin’s work can be viewed on her Instagram and website. Begin’s prints and paintings can purchased through Mothflower, PaperView, and Sears Peyton Gallery.