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Poetry

“Gal,” “Say What,” Communion”

 

GAL

 

She’s so helpless and the undertone

is spooky-ooky! She’s so natural

and the assumption is heaven high

is gilded and gyrific, is, like chakras.

I mean, placement for purpose. I mean,

outward burst. She’s so blond! And

I mean BLOND. Like, a dirty dove.

How the most familiar thing becomes

the opposite of gentle when dead.

She means well when she asks you

to touch her, when she negotiates

the abyss. She only means to tell

on herself, she’s only making history.

 

SAY WHAT

 

the most painful thing i know is a mother

a shadow behind the sheet but the sheet is the surface

of a frozen over lake

the moment you first bust your own skin

being called ugly

i can barely stand the sun much less

growing cold

it is not all so dark and down

it is funny too! like

how i give my whole life to the idea

of art but nothing gives back

like how no one matters and everything

silenced gets the last laugh

yea, i’m cracking the fuck up y’all

i’m rolling

down a hill and the hill

is made of holes

 

COMMUNION

 

The image is ruined because I learned too much. The image is cohesion.

There is the narrative of loss, and then there is the shame.

Mud on sunstone.

Water withheld.

I cannot be here now because I did not invite me.

I cannot remember because I never went. In high school homecoming

was as foreign as money. Prom only ever a violence. Everything

a vile-ence these days. I’m over the bloodletting.

 

Don’t be so coy.

 

In high school dicks shook their blame at me like a candy.

Living is always a risk. I know this now, how I yearn for haptic, how I

throw away obscurity. I’m smarter tho. I figured it out. Water is wet

and blood still is. No one cares about coherence; we only want mud-sun.

There is only ever the filthy event.

Adele Elise Williams Adele Elise Williams is a writer, editor, and educator. She is a finalist for The Georgia Review’s 2022 Loraine Williams Poetry Prize and the winner of the Emily Morrison Poetry Prize and Inprint Donald Barthelme Prize for Poetry as well as the recipient of fellowships from UCROSS, Inprint, and Hindman Settlement School.

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More from Issue 7: Winter/Spring 2023

Fiction

Night Bus

by Rory Say

Poetry

“Angel’s Share,” “Mother of Muses,” “Do I Really Have Nothing At All,” “Secondhand God”

by MICHAEL CHANG