FIVE: Sonya Vatomsky & Friends / February 26, 2016 by Sonya Vatomsky

for jp

So it took fifteen years but she finally got you;
crawled so slow from the well that no table-legs shook.
And the bells didn’t ring and the wine had receded –
had I pinned the wings sooner would there be something left?
We thought you were the hand and the world a bloodsucker;
we were popping it pink
like a liminal flinch. And the selfless thing is
my own selfishness’ echo – had I pinned the wings sooner
would there be something left?
It’s just me and my bottles,
and my vials of formaldehyde,
and the well-water dries into air that remains.
There’s a framed lock of hair that smells almost how you did
as the walls kick their feet
like empty-handed dinner guests.

Sonya Vatomsky is a Moscow-born, Seattle-raised ghost. They are the author of Salt is for Curing (Sator Press) & My Heart in Aspic (Porkbelly Press) and a poetry editor at Anthropoid. Find them by saying their name five times in front of a bathroom mirror or at sonyavatomsky.tumblr.com.

allison anne dabbles in all sorts of things, but spends an awful lot of time making mixed media art with the company of two fussy cats in minneapolis, minnesota. the products of such nonsense can be found at allisonanne.com & deardetective.com.

FOUR: Sonya Vatomsky & Friends / February 25, 2016 by Sonya Vatomsky

Erasure of Nick Cave's "Do You Love Me?"

Sonya Vatomsky is a Moscow-born, Seattle-raised ghost. They are the author of Salt is for Curing (Sator Press) & My Heart in Aspic (Porkbelly Press) and a poetry editor atAnthropoid. Find them by saying their name five times in front of a bathroom mirror or atsonyavatomsky.tumblr.com.

THREE: Sonya Vatomsky & Friends / February 24, 2016 by Sonya Vatomsky

Tenebrous

Short stories really stress me out;
I imagine myself inside the person who wrote them and
it’s so different – I can’t find gravity
or even a hand
or a foothold. Just now
someone from Bulgaria unfriended me on Facebook
which feels like rejection
from someone who should have held me close
because immigrating as a child
means I am a baby bird who bonds to anything
that smells remotely right. I am a forensic cosmonaut
detecting the goddamn smallest trace of dill
and making it seem larger
than anything actually relevant. It stresses me out,
my bad stomach and the tea for my bad stomach
and the caffeine and headaches chasing each other
across the night sky. I guess in the end we
both ran out of things to say
like two people who were sitting outside
as the sun went down
without anyone noticing.

Crane & Heron

All
winter
long
we
passed
our
need
back
and
forth
in
a
bottle;
it
was
strong
but
never
enough
for
two.

Sonya Vatomsky is a Moscow-born, Seattle-raised ghost. They are the author of Salt is for Curing (Sator Press) & My Heart in Aspic (Porkbelly Press) and a poetry editor atAnthropoid. Find them by saying their name five times in front of a bathroom mirror or atsonyavatomsky.tumblr.com.

Colleen Louise Barry is an artist, teacher, and writer based in Seattle, WA. Her comics and poems appear or are forthcoming in jubilat, The Rumpus, The Tampa Review, H_NGM_N, and other places. A chapbook of drawings and poems, Sunburn / Freezer Burn, is available from smoking glue gun (2014). Another chapbook, The Glidden Poems, made out of paint sample swatches from Home Depot, is forthcoming from dancing girl press (2015). Colleen teaches art and writing at Hugo House and Seattle ReCreative. She is also the founding editor in chief of Mount Analogue.

TWO: Sonya Vatomsky & Friends / February 23, 2016 by Sonya Vatomsky

Peristalsis

for jp

I
Over the winter one learns a lot, like
how to eat your own snakeskin and the smell
of nostalgia and how to not take it personally
when something happens
that is very personal.

II
I drew you out like an infection,
a burr, a splinter in the heel of our shared thirst;
that polyglot gluttony where I conjugate
as you decline
and the air bares its teeth to bite
the part of the night we don’t mind not remembering.

III
It is good to keep company
with alchemists, to spin the wool of adolescence
into amends for that last great chill,
when the salt was mistaken for sugar and
the whole damned thing went awry
because baking is a virtue. I can’t help but think
I am virtuous.

IV
My boots fill with mud, and my cup fills with wine,
and our eyes fill the other’s like a sea
reflected in a well
dug by soft, blister-free fingers. What
are you supposed to do when your friends die
before you’ve finished your drink? It’s enjoyable
to be alone,
but never without warning.

V
Send my regards to the void; we’ll meet up again
or we won’t and my guts will unclench
or they won’t and it’ll mean something then
(or it won’t)
and I’ll keep sucking on this life
‘til it loses all flavor.

J Paige Heinen lives in Bellingham, WA with her very fluffy cat, Sim. She enjoys taking long walks to look at the sky, and conversations about favorite childhood breakfast cereals. Sim's favorite cereal is turkey.

ONE: Sonya Vatomsky & Friends / February 22, 2016 by Sonya Vatomsky

Dead Woman Poem

There’s a dead woman in my house; we sit together, teacups raised
and gums stinging with licorice my father brings from Finland – there’s
no one else who likes the taste – listen: my dead woman’s fingers,
they go bluer in winter and when she holds mine (warm but wet with the
side-effects of one of my many prescriptions, those pink lozenges, our
joking precaution to keep me from how she is, like that’s how you don’t
get dead) and there’s a second when I totally forget there’s a difference
between us; then she’s off again about the ground, the earth, the dirt –
my dead woman talking with her hands, yelling out burial is a metaphor
and not even the right one, yelling out most would be fine with seafloor
blue going down, with a kind of breath holding, yelling out auto-aquatic
asphyxiation. And the thing is, I know there’s a difference but I don’t
always care. Give me peat bog, give me cheap soil, give me ashes –
or spontaneous combustion, even, because if you want a trace then
you don’t really mean it, says my dead woman with her bright dead
voice and our tea goes down her throat a big joyful thing, this spreading
out of warmth, this brief moment in which I can’t say
I really want to go anywhere.