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Ruth Madievsky

NESTING DOLLS


I’ve been waking with an empty net in my hands.
                                                                  I’ve been re-reading the Neruda poem  
                                                    about the rain taking off her clothes.
                         Tonight the moon is a surgical mask and the stars psych ward refugees.
                                                                                                         Somewhere in this zip code,
                                                               two teenagers are making a backseat holy,  
           their hips harmonizing with the radio, a gun in the glove compartment.
There is always a gun in the glove compartment,
                                        just as there will always be parties where I accept a ride home
                                                                                              from someone whose name
                                        I’ve spent the last two hours dragging through dirt.               Right now,
              you think I’m eating pasta with a friend who has a PhD and a dog  
                                                                              and doesn’t feel like a spare tire most of the time.
Really, I’m home, thinking about nesting dolls
                        and how all my life I’ve been a charley horse in the thigh of some god.
                                                             There’s this dream where my heart is a salted pretzel,
       which is better than the one where my body is a looted ship,
                                                                                                                    which isn’t a dream at all.
                                        I keep thinking we are in the temple of the apathetic ghost
       or picturing us on Plymouth Rock,  
                                                             where I am burying the flag of my finger
                        beneath the band of your jeans.                      Call me an armchair romantic.
Call me when you finish your old Cuban,
                                        when you leave the bar with the beautiful women on tap,
       so I can tell you I’ve decided not to be a broken window anymore.
                                                                                        It’s going to be all rapid-fire dick jokes
                        and YouTube videos of Celtic dance from here on out.
                                                 We’ll be a Labor Day barbeque.
I’ll be the watermelon  
                        and you can be the spoon.  


SHADOWBOXING
after Jackson Burgess


Here are the sex cries
my neighbors threw against my walls,
here is the hair you left on my pillow,
here is the sound I made when I found out
my grandfather has cancer,
here are the bats
that sleep in my lungs.

Here is the fire escape,
and here is what happened on the fire escape,
a matchbox, a light bulb,
a box of Sudafed, scissors.

Here is my body making love to its shadow,
music of teeth against teeth,
lips against neck,
my body a basketball hoop,
a flat tennis ball, broken beer bottle,
here is the prescription
I haven’t worked up the nerve to fill.

Here is Los Angeles
begging someone to hold its hair back while it vomits
a gas mask, a lighter, a butterfly
with its back wings torn off.

Here I am naked, apologizing for being naked.
Here is a concave mirror.
Here is me falling into the concave mirror.
Here is the question
of where I will land or if.

BRIDGE, SHADOW, HAND

I would like to say something about bridges,
                        bridges and hands, how when you hold hands on a bridge
            it no longer feels like a bridge,
                                                how after, watching a lit candle do that thing you like
with the dark, you decide it doesn’t really matter
                        whether your life is simple in its collapsibility
            or collapsible in its simplicity,
                                    you think the questions you have with yourself
                                                            are just tinted vials in a medicine cabinet,
                        who cares if your body
                                                is a dormant volcano,
            what does it matter which of your friends have picked out names
                                    for their first three children
                                                                        while you spent most of the day
                                             feeling like a receipt someone forgot at McDonald’s,
and can I just share this theory
                        that a person can fall down her own shadow,
                                    that sex is not always about breaking and entering
                        though both involve thresholds and hands
and sometimes cuffs for those hands,
                                                what is it anyway about hearing someone you love
            speak your name
                                    that feels like being rocked back and forth,
is there anything more sacred
                        than that person’s mouth,
                                                how it opens like a renaissance,
                                                                        how it is always a metaphor for sex,
                                    so you are an astronaut
each time you necromance another curve of the body,
                                                                                    so you have this desire
            to touch other people’s things,
                        it’s all relative, the way you enter the museum of love,
                                                               how you are always standing too close to the paintings,
leaving the blue of your breath
                                    behind as a fingerprint,
                                                it’s okay, it’s alright, this bridge isn’t going anywhere,
            the maple leaves are happy to see you,
                                                            the water below doesn’t want you in its arms,
                        you are not going to fade out like a cough,
                                    the person whose skin you are touching
                                                                        wants you to read it like braille,
                                                this blood rollercoastering your arteries
            says, Put his finger in your mouth,
                                                            think about the merging of shadows,
                                 imagine the body as a lamp,
                                                                                     which it is.



--
­­Ruth Madievsky's first poetry collection, Emergency Brake, was named Tavern Books' 2015­-2016 Wrolstad Contemporary Poetry Series selection and is forthcoming in January 2016. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Gulf Coast, Prairie Schooner, Rattle, ZYZZYVA, and elsewhere. She was a 2015 Tin House Scholar in Poetry. She is originally from Moldova and lives in Los Angeles, where she is a doctoral student at USC’s School of Pharmacy. You can find her at ruthmadievsky.com.  ­­


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  • Home
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  • Issue #27 Spring 2024
    • Issue #27 Art Spring 2024 >
      • Kristina Erny Spring 2024
      • Luiza Maia Spring 2024
      • Christy Lee Rogers Spring 2024
      • Erika Lynet Salvador Spring 2024
      • Marsha Solomon Spring 2024
    • Issue #27 Poetry Spring 2024 >
      • Terry Belew Spring 2024
      • Dustin Brookshire​ & Diamond Forde Spring 2024 Spring 2024
      • Dustin Brookshire​ & Caridad Moro-Gronlier Spring 2024 Spring 2024
      • Charlie Coleman Spring 2024
      • Isabelle Doyle Spring 2024
      • Reyzl Grace Spring 2024
      • Kelly Gray Spring 2024
      • Meredith Herndon Spring 2024
      • Mina Khan Spring 2024
      • Anoushka Kumar Spring 2024
      • Cate Latimer Spring 2024
      • BEE LB Spring 2024
      • Grace Marie Liu​ Spring 2024
      • Sarah Mills Spring 2024
      • Faisal Mohyuddin 2024
      • Marcus Myers Spring 2024
      • Mike Puican Spring 2024
      • Sarah Sorensen Spring 2024
      • Lynne Thompson Spring 2024
      • Natalie Tombasco Spring 2024
      • Alexandra van de Kamp Spring 2024
      • Donna Vorreyer Spring 2024
    • Fiction #27 Spring 2024 >
      • Bryan Betancur Spring 2024
      • Karen George Spring 2024
      • Raja'a Khalid Spring 2024
      • Riley Manning Spring 2024
      • Adina Polatsek Spring 2024
      • Beth Sherman Spring 2024
    • Nonfiction #27 Spring 2024 >
      • Liza Olson Spring 2024
  • Issue #28 Fall 2024
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      • Eric Calloway Fall 2024
      • Matthew Fertel Fall 2024
      • JooLee Kang Fall 2024
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      • Sean Layh Fall 2024
    • Issue #28 Poetry Fall 2024 >
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      • Diane Raptosh Fall 2024
      • Isaac Richards Fall 2024
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      • Alex Tretbar Fall 2024
      • Ruth Williams Fall 2024
      • Shannon K. Winston Fall 2024
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      • Anne Gerard Fall 2024
    • Issue #28 Fiction Fall 2024 >
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  • Issue #29 Spring 2025
    • Issue #29 Art Spring 2025 >
      • Irina Greciuhina Spring 2025
      • Jesse Howard Spring 2025
      • Paul Simmons Spring 2025
      • Marsha Solomon Spring 2025
      • Elzbieta Zdunek Spring 2025
      • Na Yoon Amelia Cha-Ryu Spring 2025
    • Issue #29 Poetry Spring 2025 >
      • Deborah Bacharach Spring 2025
      • Diego Báez Spring 2025
      • Jaswinder Bolina Spring 2025
      • ​Ash Bowen Spring 2025
      • Christian J. Collier Spring 2025
      • ​Shou Jie Eng Spring 2025
      • Sara Fitzpatrick Spring 2025
      • Matthew Gilbert Spring 2025
      • Tammy C. Greenwood Spring 2025
      • Alejandra Hernández ​Spring 2025
      • Ben Kline ​Spring 2025
      • ​David Moolten Spring 2025
      • ​Tamer Mostafa Spring 2025
      • ​Rongfei Mu Spring 2025
      • Cynthia Neely Spring 2025
      • Pablo Otavalo Spring 2025
      • ​Bleah Patterson Spring 2025
      • ​M.A. Scott Spring 2025
      • ​Liam Strong ​ Spring 2025
      • Alexandra van de Kamp Spring 2025
      • ​Cassandra Whitaker Spring 2025
      • Angelique Zobitz Spring 2025
    • Issue #29 Fiction Spring 2025 >
      • Vanessa Blakeslee Spring 2025
      • K. J. Coyle Spring 2025
      • Meredith MacLeod Davidson Spring 2025
      • Jessica Mosher Spring 2025
    • Issue #29 Nonfiction Spring 2025 >
      • JM Huscher Spring 2025
      • Qurrat ul Ain Raza Abbas Spring 2025