If I ask anything of you, I’m already betraying myself.
Lights low, comforter unwrapped, unwashed, our backs

in what must be a form of nature long disregarded
but now held. Held meaning scraped, torn into again.

We cannot speak yet. There’s a contract. There are rules.
Each of them: allowances, I beg for too much, I leap

toward too hot a flame, too bright a surface. Let me
not get ahead of myself here, let me exchange

this moment, not out of embarrassment, but for
a memory. We were sleeping. We were damp

above the sheets where we had been translating
shame and guilt and muscle. Actually, it was never

about any of that. There are rules. There’s a contract.
Let me return to where I can be simplest: in service.

If I am honoring myself, I am sworn with your spit.
I’ve been so good for you, our backs— this bright surface.

Published September 1, 2024

Nick Soluri is a poet and playwright from North Carolina. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Shō Poetry Journal, Pidgeonholes, Albany Poets, Poetry South, Ghost City Review, and others. He's the author of the chapbook Cartilage (Bottlecap Press, 2022) and holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. He tweets @nerkcelery.

Magdalena Paz was born in Santiago, Chile in 1990. She currently lives in Berlin, Germany. Her artistic process is heavily run by her obsession with organising and reorganising that came about from a constant displacement growing-up. On the other hand, it parallels her athletic practice in the form of endurance, and spontaneity as a result of preparation. The work itself picks repetitive thoughts, unanswered questions, and curiosities that come into the artists awareness again and again and it confines them in a physical space where they can move on to provoke awareness, or questions, in others. She considers painting, like sport, to be a highly physical and mental process—often demanding long uninterrupted hours of work.