PICTURE WAS TAKEN by Patty Paine
SHERDS by Lily Klinek
a scrape deep in the chest
spoon sliding rough along the contours of
ceramic, they were shards even
before they were broken.
this kind of ash floats weightless on wind,
bears faint outlines of
tectonics resting in wait to erupt.
lines have been carved here,
deep in me, below the kiln of my lungs,
a trace and re-trace of paths onto map book,
fold on themselves as
waves, to hint at dissolution.
something curdled in me, i think,
turned sour by praise
or by lack thereof, equally likely.
the unlikely thing was me,
the gentle skyward curve of a lip,
hands outstretched,
fingertips sliding over smooth shards,
watching these fragments re-form.
my professor dedicates his life to studying
pottery shards from Pompeii,
like mine, those ancient remnants have breaking points.
i have trained myself to reform, then and now,
brush painstakingly at cracks until smooth,
peaceful as folk song, curling languid, silken, from car radio.
fine dust settles onto hood, into exhaust pipe,
all winds are just a deep inhale from
another place.
YOUR OWN MAKING by Patty Paine
EMERGENCE by Lily Klinek
begin here, your hand at my cheekbone. these things take time.
the egg of a mayfly adheres after its slow, downward float
to a stone on the stream-bed,
edges nonexistent, as if expertly quenelled by rough, watery hands.
a current runs over my collarbone,
up through my neck and spilling into a waterfall over my jawline.
feel it in your fingers — it flows there too.
the very same water, caught in whirlpool.
your hands smooth over my skin,
and mayflies imagine their eventual emergence, from water, skyward.
their gills resemble the leaves they watch through liquid lens,
a flare and a taper, clustered in bunches along the branches,
floating during winter on the stream’s surface,
these shapes all echoed in their chests.
curl your hands around yourself.
feel your own lungs swell and contract, mirroring shapes you’ve never seen.
as they die, female mayflies drift to rest on the water’s surface.
translucent wings as rafts, slowly waterlogged and sinking down, again,
just as at birth.
you stare at your reflection, mine,
your eyes as two horizontal leaves. the rush of blood through your ears resembles
the curvature of current around jagged rocks.
as they breathe, tiny eddies of water swirl around and through the mayflies’ bodies,
enough to propel them forward,
up and into the air.
Lily Klinek is a student at UC Berkeley, and is currently Managing Editor of Berkeley Poetry Review. Her writing explores the ways we carry emotion, inhabit our own bodies in illness and health, and find ourselves pulled towards or away from expression. She studies environmental science, but makes room in her heart for poetry and language, always.
Patty Paine is the author of Grief & Other Animals (Accents Publishing), The Sounding Machine (Accents Publishing), and three chapbooks. She edited Gathering the Tide: An Anthology of Contemporary Arabian Gulf Poetry and The Donkey Lady and Other Tales from the Arabian Gulf. Her poems, reviews, and interviews have appeared in Blackbird, Adroit, Gulf Stream, Waxwing, Thrush, The South Dakota Review, and other publications. She is the founding editor of Diode Poetry Journal, and Diode Editions, and is Director of Liberal Arts & Sciences at VCUarts Qatar.