I sat with a boy by the lake
who put his hand on my knee to tell me what the JV soccer team knew
about Swamp Molly,
a tangled mass of every thing/one found at the bottom of the lake
who drifts from cove to cove, shrieking. 

I got up
     not because I knew fear predicted sex
but to try to see something that moved around in its own hunger.

She lives in the lake
the TVA made
so we all had lights to flick off
then back on after the Lord’s prayer

& to power the blue orb glow of a Gamecube
reflecting into the whites of my brothers’ eyeballs
as they sat, down the hall, in such a tight line
I see one profiled slope of Brother.

I have a fourth, somewhere
in Mississippi felling trees.
He had a hole in his timber boots, so small
a brown recluse got in.
By the time he lurched out of the woods
his foot was graying from his body.
I was so afraid of what I might let in
I slept with my sneakers on.

What I am really afraid of,
I tell my friend
once we are all 30 and know better,
is going through the glass tunnels 
on those slowly moving walkways in an aquarium
and looking up and seeing — 
a crack?
no, no.
Seeing nothing
being at the bottom of emptiness.

The last time I saw myself from across the lake — 
I swam
losing everything around me.

I’ve sat still, hunched
my nails like 
animal deep ragged moons.
I used to follow instructions like
c’mere baby
come — 
I’ve been called sweet enough times
and more than that
when I’ve had someone else’s fingers in my mouth
I think of carrots — 
^

I am moving my hunger back towards myself.
I want to tell this boy what I know about fear;
I am the tunnel to kiss on the mouth, my own collection of

sweet
sink
rot.

Published November 24, 2024

Makayla Gay hails from Southeastern Kentucky. Her work has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Tupelo Quarterly, and Adroit Journal (forthcoming). Her chapbook, Hackles, is out April 2025 with Girl Noise Press.

Michelle Jezierski’s (b. Berlin, 1981; lives and works in Berlin) paintings unfurl simultaneous spaces that are awash in light. Contrasts between bright and dark and muted as well as lucent hues engender a singular atmosphere characterized by depth and dynamism. The artist is as invested in the perception of these constructed spaces as in the capaciousness of natural landscapes. In her paintings, luminous colors and geometric disturbances achieve shifting balances between the extremes of order and chaos, light and shadow, interior and exterior, structure and flux.

Michelle Jezierski studied with Tony Cragg at the Berlin University of Arts and graduated from Valérie Favre’s class in 2008. She also received a fellowship for a semester abroad at Cooper Union, New York, where she studied with Amy Sillman.