Thick With Conviction

REAR VIEW The heart stops. The dark stark up from beneath her fingernails like wrecks on water, frost smoke glows through lonely. Island and underskirt press into thick hips, lending to the reverie of the last girl on earth. Periphery loots from her to meet the artifice of wind, rustling all memories and miseries pistilled with roots for the scrawl of elegies. Nocturnes of the sea spend ripe in her mouth cooling to relic of things wild and doomed, cadence of sounds holds eventides as she holds jetsam to her chest. INSIDE THE CANVAS TOP It starts with forsythia and sacrosanct; the portrait of you whispering blooms. Each day, I embroider throat as a wound, smoke and drift wag as good as a tongue, dripping ooze on the canvas top. Be some- thing the night unlocks, I lift your stems above the light, sending hiss of words as might a hot mouth on empty. Now I paint your flesh into the trees beside dark, set birds to the palm that opens to coincide

Hotmail once or twice a year I scroll down to the deepest subbasement of my oldest email account and see the earliest email saved, Subject: Sorry and part of the way through she writes how she needs to end this letter because she’s starting to cry, but wants me to know it was worth it and some days I agree, and some days I don’t know what to do with all this black tar sticking to my lungs worming its way into my bloodstream clogging my heart, blinding my eyes leaving me alone and listless on a silent, cold Friday night in March but I never delete it, and I never go back there and read it until enough new moons have passed that I need to see where I came from, where it all began, the place where the cracks started to form in my peripheral and grew into this collection of broken bottles and chunks of rebar cement moving forward, though sometimes looking back, Subject: Sorry aren’t we all? My Gratitude there is a Taoist belief that it takes the dark of ni

Master Class: Cinderella Practicing Violin It takes special skill to acknowledge that almost anything may be mended. My mother plays the piano, beats her knuckles against the black and white keys—welds sounds together. Fingers thick; nails painted crimson not the typical hands of a concert pianist. Above her depicted in a Victorian dress—the instrument serving as her accessory; her captive audience. Who unhinged the gate through which her carriage, was set to arrive? (previously published in Zaum) On Lenin’s Mausoleum and Love After Jenny Browne Not every glance is capable of conveying all things at once: love, anger, frustration. I remember your mother’s house the inside of a ship. I know you thought things would be alright turning to sand, all of it coming down. In “Love Letter to a Stranger” you’re always you and I’m always me. A body you’ll do anything to preserve. (previously published in Scryptic) Alla Vilnyansky was born in the Ukraine and came to t