NORTHERN SUMMER

already turning day again,

we at the top of the world

rotate facing our star.

skye cum down praise the light

ashen-faced hands of clouds

lit from within alabaster

how can we dream if it is never night?

how do you stray, untraceable?

a bit-coin--you just appear

nimble torso of dawn

are you grateful goddess, for swift wifi and summer storms?

perpetually cold and awake

| white lines |

hazardous into constant morning

you stream into me sans the network of dreams

THE ANIMALS

across the road from my house

a limping dog sang of sorrows

I wanted to begin his life again

so I shot him

and laid on cement

his blood stinging my skin

for hours long

without tremor

I picked the heron

off the sand

I pulled out

a feather

and more

until it was

dead and

naked

a snake in the garage tonight

as i was slipping outside for a smoke

by the rose garden, and like any other

terrestrial serpent it languished

slowly to the kudzu, a press here

and there, of its body on the still

heated cement

far away, a whole universe

trembles like a cold pigeon

BONES

If I die in the sweaty white car today promise you'll carve into my bones

Promise that you'll polish my 12 gleaming sentries until the moon shines against the guardians of my lungs

Promise you'll inscribe the letters of my wandering soul upon those bones that carried me

I could never thank you for your labor.

and I've already traveled so far in these nights it seems like my bones would know my unmaker singing and rattling the way bones do in the wind like a bottle tree trembling with gravity

you could sharpen a point on the end of my femur and defend yourself from assailants

you could use me forever.

artistry and cutlery a joint proposition.

and you could remember when I told you about the time it rained so hard I could feel the pelting rain on my scapula and spine. the time it monsooned and I thought if I died someone could use my frame to build a bone raft

but now I know that I want my bones striped in maroon berry paint.
I think I should have always been strange like that. a skeletal leper
a striped interior

SASHA KLUPCHAK is a filmmaker, poet, and academic exploring the relationship between film and body-history. In her free time, she draws snakes & orbs, and eats melons of all kinds.