June & hands unsure if they want to become hands,
& the dogs tied to a woman’s hip bones, searching
the space between us & finding a stillborn.
June & letting the light leak fast through the car window
as Arizona appears like a dead giant over the hood.
June & red bones & red mesas.
June & stretching my mouth wider
than it has ever been, even when it was a phoebe,
into a sinkhole, your hands loose & jointless against the gums.
June & the dogs sleeping in the yard, dissipating into black smoke,
as wrens fall backward out of an oiled sky.
June & sitting lemon slices onto my tongue
until I become a mangrove. June & pulling me apart
like the bones of a New Year fish.
June & how I could be one of those women
who are born of tea leaves & kerosene, who leave
birthmarks in the bathroom sink to prove it.
June & June & another stillborn in the tub,
soaking in the murk of cassava & chollas.
June & warblers suspended mid-flight in the air,
& you skinning June like a fish.
June & Phoenix dissolving between my fingers
like evening light. June & the hymns
that resound from the desert mornings,
saguaros coiling into their abdomens
at the slow wane of June into our hill-rotted mouths.
Yes, June & the jackrabbit shotgunned
out across the highway, the baby in the backseat
wailing like a bronze trumpet, June & how
for a moment I was the shotgunned jackrabbit,
& I was the sobbing baby, & I was the voice
that dipped like a minnow & folded into it
as June kneeled & slippered under the tires,
as though dropping, beak-first, into glass.
Cylindropuntia
We Eat Breakfast at 7:30, Lunch at 12, and Dinner at 5
during visitation
my mother removes her skin
like peeling off a wet shirt
drapes it over my blue shoulders
her grief calcifying to a tooth in my mouth
don’t stay here, she said,
my daughter of crushed jasmine leaves,
her hands compressing around my biceps
like the barrel of my father’s shotgun
constricting around a glassed buckshot
to make it shriek
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Kathryn Hargett is a senior at the Alabama School of Fine Arts. Her work has been regularly recognized by universities and organizations such as Princeton University, the Alliance for Young Artists & Writers, the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities, the Alabama Writers' Forum, the UK Poetry Society, and others. She is the editor-in-chief of TRACK//FOUR, a literary magazine for writers and artists of color. Her poetry has been published in or is forthcoming from the Adroit Journal, Gigantic Sequins, DIALOGIST, the Fem, |tap| magazine, Sierra Nevada Review, and elsewhere. She is a Chinese-American poet from the outskirts of Birmingham, Alabama.
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