Atlas and Alice, Issue 18
Karly Jacklin
IN WHICH WE DON’T HUNT DOVES BUT INSTEAD AIM OUR SHOTGUNS AT THE SKY I wake up alone in it: It, the heirloom gleam of misery. Inherited, like this feeling was something locked in my grandmother’s chest until January. Until “mother meet ground.” Mother me, ground. And I don’t ask for this sequence—nobody ever does—but every day, it follows suit. Either new life is spilled out of a womb, or at last, a rotten body sucks in its final swarming breath, Oh God, we were given such a shitty story. But here, I’m telling you this: I can pick out the good parts. Or change them entirely, because in the end, we grow out of the things we thought we would have forever: allergies, baby curls, each other. And before I tell you that our love, if that is the name we give this, has found its place to die, or worse, that it’s near it, I would tell you that I’ve never seen you looking so beautiful (all loose tits and blurred edge, I could have eaten all of you). But that would be a lie because I have seen you like this: You leaving. You returning. Every toothless gap between the two. I have always seen you like this: The woman is made snake or salt or gold, the woman is always made, face and shape and figure repeating.
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