Mara Vahratian

The rock salt sped into fishtail, cool girls get braids. Dress heave and succulents run me ragged; the real desert is not as such but it’s staggering and wide until rising. Away to peaks and swept skin into you dignified, me older. Falls, piece a twist and flotsam the cycling practice of large lakes, of the bridgeless. What processes produced tides inland and a girl on an album cover, all eyes even bigger than mine. Capable jazz phrasing. I shot the brow-berm, sure at five with bb and glass jars I shot it good enough to ping and set brine flowing. Under the stairs my grandmother kept pickled carrots tomatoes cucumbers some cans twenty years old all for a long winter or depression or genocide that did not, thankfully, arrive. Eras circle, twine a roughness and make gold sounds busted - who went and tied me to the earth, who asked. Almost all mammals know cordage. Moon and starts and the swimming blizzard is streetlamp-honeyed. Local dive bombs. We circumnav, I mean fussy - some historical version ace-deuce, remember this the number five evening of your life, ginned the hell out with wet feet. Luck as falsetto, is boyish, fits awkward.

On photogenic, cut my teeth. Hands down the negative

of it, lens flare in

the fruitskin so good I’m not there.

Winter jumpsuit. A fox

is something of a sassy dog and seems also flowerish,

agile little feet, opportunist.

The only one searching for you.

Stacks and stacks of vocals make session girls.

In the play he said pink cathedral what the ever-living. At least we can all agree beauty is performative. Photo-finish primed and lovelier than peonies than guitar solos, one generation shot through with luminous faces and faux naiveté. The next with middle parts and wide pants. Becomingly fat asses; I don’t even know my good side. Every striking match, every one of us carbon carbon carbon and under the right geological conditions we deteriorate but slow. She drinks a sour beer and is eyes across the room, lit up from the inside and flaring kindly, indiscriminate. If when girls we’d had a man-easy language for our own desires. It still seems barely legal. I wanted to fuck every graying dude in glasses. I wanted to be pushing the hair out of your eyes forever and ever. We’re closing ranks, we’re the look-back and the dance band filling stadiums – the 80s for you versus me, the beginning of an end versus beginning in a snowstorm. A closet full of black tees / 501s and learning how to dress again. To be more talented than one’s lack - so little to complain about, no finger cut off at the second-to-last knuckle. Just that steppe-wide gaze a bad brain weak ankles. I miss that stupid ache; still find my father’s James Brown slide across the kitchen floor a particular kind of grace.

Lucky to be named, lucky to be a girl and wear something odd and grow into it. The sea, bitterness of leaving her own people forever, destroyer. Climb the wheel and walk your yak in circles. Uh doy, even animals should get a chance to improve their karma. I don’t want to but I destroy everything.

Haute sequential, lust barricade is hazel, spangled

shadows and flaking gold deep in it. Just a poor girl in a rich man’s house.

Little gem I call rabbit and tick, the interior blood-flushed so

you’re not conscious of it. Songs full of water of animals, sweat

heat. Carved soapstone is the brush-off,

essential vitamins in whale skin for to grow

hair and nails and civilization. Give a speech re: the nature of a specific, nomadic girlishness

– well constant as a northern star and I said. Between bangs and bangs are lashes

and crooked river, our great inland waterway for thirty centuries maybe more

rooted than I credit myself pointing homeward on my hand. In suede chukkas,

learning run-along til there’s sand inside. Try, a little tenderness.