Black Princess

Blue

by joanna maldonado

Nursling

by maggie shoup

Sometimes in the night insistent fingers pinching at my raw breast his head smelling of soil and mangos, there is nothing left to take. What else can be pillaged? Bones were rearranged, my skin carved into. Even time was thieved by his suckling mouth, that new fast clock bearing down on the obligations of birth, sustenance, death, moments between essential steps compressed. My bright-faced babe, he is Einstein's wicked train altering what I know even of the passage of time; his death would be mine.

Fingers flutter against my navel, excavating a line between what is his and what may I retain a vicious gulf laying out so broad, into it drains even the brightness of my mind with his sweat soaked curls and perhaps I am too tired to eat. Perhaps my nails blacken and the glib illuminations of my face sink, drawn into the swirl of his cavernous mouth.

Once I teased death. Each precipice mocked, caressed. Now I plead and supplicate for my milky bird-boned love. Every ounce of me goes in offering, some given, some stolen torn to pieces by bitter crows and by the sharpness of men or boys who will be men, bread and blood for my nursling.