by Kira Stevens

Trap a demon in a jar, and stare at it until it knows it's beautiful. Poetry is exorcism, slowly transitioning into rehabilitation. This is my life in open water; a small scale simulacrum of a minotaur wearing kitten heels. 

The edge wants to know if I take milk with my tea. It turns out Evan was right about time. Tonight brushing my teeth feels too heavy. My insecure yet hopeful goblin rides a miniature ostrich into an allegedly happy ending, but the map is wet, and everything is glass. Order is safe in the museum. The square in the circle is secure, melted into hegemonic ahistoricality—the tomorrowless tyrant. Numb to pyrexia, I keep trying to walk into sunsets.

Dropping down is at least moving somewhere. Passion unfulfilled festers into black humour. I often wonder why there never seems to be a happy medium for anything. I can never actualize what I hope to. It always comes out louder. This is the sleepwalker’s favorite song. Be careful not to wake up. The volume must be just right. When restlessness slithers into my bed, I like to imagine dying in a drowning car. I think, in that moment, I’d write the best poem of my life, because it’s over. Calefaction of a soul is time consuming. Every second will coalesce into something alive and emotionless and blind.

The genesis of scabbing sparks by the will of Medusa’s side eye. To solidify properly, a wound must first be brought to a boil, and then removed from the heat source. I lay on my living room floor and imagine little mice, with worms all over their little bodies instead of fur, stitching me back together with their millions of little mouths. I listen for the switch, when the magma begins to turn marble. A cryogenic force stops the concrete’s pour in its tracks. The stone stays as far as it had been able to reach on this ever distant path. I feel bubbles rise from my roots. I cannot wait to close back up; to be where I stop. Time cooks the skin into a shell. The soul grows a shield.