Kimberly Glanzman

Cryptophasia

                                                 after Li-Young Lee's "Pillow"

Within our childhood pages, everything:
the history of faces, a jungle of shoelaces,
 
gods kneeling in their graves. Language
is an army wresting the stars from their nests,
 
daring my tongue; a tightrope of sounds,
arrow in my hunter's heart. The noise of being
 
lost; yet under it: worlds where gravity's
a beast we ride, teeth sundering, colliding.
 
Speech wounds my hands, breaks beneath
a dragon's eye drawn close, the lie raveling
 
and unraveling, anguish a shape, like liquid,
obeying its container. Words the shadow
 
of my brother, breath that keeps its form,
defiant. Or is it the form that keeps him close, a leash?
 
Teachers, neighbors, backlit strangers, shrinks.
All implore me: talk; speak; sing; confess.
 
We're here to hear you.
My mouth's a mess.
 
Half a heartbeat, stuttered ink: tethered ghosts,
papercuts, a misplaced scream. Everything grows up
 
to be grief. The story begins on this mangled shore:
 
my blundered leap, his tangled roar dangling
from the bridge, a blur. This salted feast before me.

---

The Old Gods & the New Trees

A girl whose god is starlight worships death.
My dress hides the universe – the fuse,
some fuel, and fumes. From stones: birth.
 
My lips two lathes, my tongue a coal. Betrayed,
the winged birds fled. Flood: if I leave
the camera’s aperture open, the whole field
 
saturates, snow on blood on snow. Sudden;
swept. And what is left but girl grounded
at an altar, curled around a ram’s head,
 
pierced by prayer.
 
There, I am planted & I wake with a skirt
of earth, a stutter, bones browned and wet.
The stars were stepping stones but now
 
I am a grave, mouthful of eggs, weighted
down by sun. I only watch: skies devoured
by skies and skies never sated. Black
 
with salt and meat, the sea mourns
the once upon a time she was a womb.
​

--
Kimberly Glanzman holds an MFA from the University of Kentucky. She was a finalist for the 2019 Stella Kupferberg Memorial Short Story Prize and a 2020 Pushcart Nominee. Her work has previously appeared or is forthcoming in Electric Lit, South Dakota Review, Stonecoast Review, Sky Island Journal, and Porter House Review, among others.