Ally Harris

MARCHOŁT

 

A heavy brown moth in a water cup, my grammar sinks & freights in its own bacteria

after a night spent counting ways to stay awake. During this self-sentence I cut me down

the middle, two decomposers bopping to a beat the shape of a window, of someone else’s

rib. What happens when you open it? Candy dribbles from its bloodless shell. Nobody

wants it any. You’ve meat on your lip, dziadek, you’ve come a swollen eye on you. I’ve

learnt your purple onion trick, how it never was an apple. You pressed it to my palm and

offered me a bite, dug a splinter ‘til it bled but never found the wood there. I was a child.

Then: every day, on the bus, the same seat, another newspaper into which I puddle dark

forgetfulness, then watch it gush like shrapnel into space. You pressed a thumb up to my

forehead, dziadek, death shushed you with a finger. The black branch shook gold over the

borough, a rogue blonde that locked us into bed.

NIMBUS

 

Daylight pith. November from breath then fistblue on three panes. None dim numb bust

in as I pit moth and bent fog on Alder Street in id-endowed after. The cinema fins the

window: white dots on a black screen, water. One euphoriant idea of earlier progenitor

crepitating in cellular frame. In the laurel, lantern. Was a child shadow.

 

Learn: slip hand into dirt for clam. Come up frothed in minutes earlier. Twenty six jars

left out in grass, milky in cold. Room’s window’s off-yellow squirts into tall among

stones, all rendered in units the eye built to perceive. Lanterns and krill on darked black

cord. Drifts over blue, crutched by fire. Earth crowns on its back, part scoffed dream.

Loses units like strands of hair.

biography

ALLY HARRIS is the author of two chapbooks, Her Twin Was After Me (Slim Princess Holdings, 2014) and Floor Baby (dancing girl press, 2011). She earned an MFA in Poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and teaches comp & communications to badass culinary students in Portland, OR.