Elizabeth Switaj

this dangerous habitual criminal, I fingered soles & pounded leather, shaping shoes by smell as much as by the shapes my hands rested in when their force reached the limit set by material resistance my resistance was never material in June, if soap -y smell of new flowers doesn’t lie, I said my absent eyes that […]

I heard my hands were yellow, and in the lines I could feel deeper, like tea I never knew what any of that means if colors have smells then yellow lingered in front of my face when I held up my sweet tobacco-scented hands against the heat —a waste, I burned anyway I was already […]

for Diana Manister   the dead are peaceful equals rain falls up                           Axiom of Bibles  not named book minus obtuse angel                    a transitive property of geometric faiths dead vanish into torments dreamed to peel real fantom flesh w/o chance of Heaven            perfection lost w/o-ne set o’ praisesong wings equals water without sin dead vanish into […]

without burning when everything is heat & sex and can & can’t and Yes & yes cool breath that draws beads of cicada-drenched humidity from where they suffocate your neck can’t be transmitted by nerves called love without getting caught in reflex loops of fuck & fuck eventually we wake to no whether in illness […]

eventually we found the plane settled in a sea of glass shards between        bright-blood fish who settled on our skin to suck whatever remained unfocused on retrieval & so converted instinct into genius of desire you took so many feet with you to wander, blend your slender bones (less skin) into starved processions too tired […]

fire tries the rotten planks soft-surround     like my rotten toes & fungal nails        brittle bones osteoporotic names for my hands & what they say could peel away the bark & heart where my potato bugs & larvae scramble, lay their secrets to impure oxygen & light in lichen lattice they stand for something , move […]