time slipped from our grasp and like a moony girl we clung harder to our holy texts filtering out life’s variegated strings, jaws of spit tautening in the crevices a mouth wishing only for a better pair of breasts. candles melted at windowsills the heart rolled in the earth’s slip — judgement, self-flagellation, pity — these things returned to the core of a person where once a body ambulated without the condition of a gaze though we accustomed with eerie quickness to each other’s evaluation you cannot decide where lightning will strike; and the trust between us dissolved; animals died horrifically unremarked upon; hearts were felled by disrepute and lies; soles socked in lead; everyone of us intubated as a psychotic desire to reinvent one’s self continued to abound; it was like the time I had to get drunk to tell you how I felt, genuflecting before the knot of ice blood beading my cuticles, and what I wanted to say was I’d like to imagine this world in another way — MARGARET SAIGH
Margaret Saigh is a writer, dancer, and educator based in Pittsburgh. She is the author of the chapbook CROSSED IN THE DARKER LIGHT OF TERROR (dancing girl press 2022), a graduate of the MFA program at the University of Pittsburgh, and the creator of circlet, a virtual poetry workshop and reading space. Her poems are forthcoming in giallo lit and A Velvet Giant.