Featured Poem

• Sandy

  Jasmine Dreame Wagner

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         News slaps on our borrowed stoop—

               a second chance to know yesterday

  
         not for its humidity but for its brash acts.

  Plastic icebergs, blue carnations, glue

         made hard and transparent by patience, the year

  
               coalesces around a doll’s hair, its sap shine.

        Where a sidewalk sharpens secrets into pennies,

  mica incinerates a whiff of light—
   

       Speak to me.

  
               Daughters, our faces are not ours

         but borrowed, as sand from shore

  is sucked out to a sandbar.

  
         A monstrous house, its insides turned out

                in the wreck of time burns

         its red dress at daybreak.

  
  I flick my pocket lighter,

        my first transgression:

             Fire is mine to hold.

  
        Gels mold over the peat, smoke its theater.

  I pretend I’ve always scrolled down Broadway,

         never learned to count to twenty. Pretend

                I fear neither ash nor wasp.
   

  +
   

  Once, in a canyon

        I watched a ram charge a peach carcass.

  The news rolls on. Like pretty girls

  
         in bodega light, I pretend

               not to see what sees me. Which is to say, I do

         not want vision, my primary form of suffering

               to close.

  
         I open my collar. A sparrow

                 exiles itself to a black blossom.

        There is spring waiting in cardboard walls.

  
               On the step, the ergonomic handle of a razor.

         On the sill, three wicks curl. Dull blades

  
                    still cut. My legs

             are built to kick. Her legs,

                   tusks.

  
  +
   

         In the club, a song sinks into the well

  of shoulders, its beat, chief of blizzard and gunfire.

         I hold my breath for the length of a joke—exhale.

  
                 Her eye nets shadows like the wings of extinct insects. 

          Rust, the darkening fabric of a pink spill and sound

                 its cavernous appetite, replace the bruise. This is to say,

  
          the subwoofer clocks our childhood back an hour.

                Rabid country, your tune has lost its dancehall.

         Spits its anthem from one side of the boombox—

  
  as link by link, the year opens

          its choke chain, says, put your head in—

                                    it’s time

             to farm new moons from clavicles. We’re still young

  
                   enough to pry a shore from its amputated palm. Later,

      in a bathroom curtain, black jeans long gray

  
  in the folds of last decade’s catalogues, I refuse the day

        its art. I watch her sleep

  with clenched fists, sing

  
         into closed fists, the sky

                pink and blue as a newborn.

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