if I leave my dad will too; she, perihelion; hatshepsut

by Dina Folgia

if I leave my dad will too

hands clutching bitter hand                               miserable callouses

wrenching plugs from sockets                           the whole power strip

clinging masculine pieta                                   rhett and bonnie blue

death’s head prostrating                                at depression’s doorstop 

pinned wings                                                  and everything else too

thorax, antennae                                                 legs, proboscis 

insectoid proximitas               electric bug zapper

fluorescent like lamps               dampened for weeks

whole limbic     annihilation

ashes and casket   side by side

arms circling gravestones   the bases of trees

desperately seizing forewings         and hindwings

all the things we’d ever need                             to go

she, perihelion

instead of physics I’ll raise you strata, something to keep you interested in the layers of her atmosphere when word of our heat doesn’t sustain you—we endotherms, exalted shiverers, always soft, eking closer to darkened sunspots—fissure freckles across damp shoulder blades, dual imprints of neptune freed from distance, begging new proximity—she’s close enough to call sol, or something brighter even, something base, made of elements far enough flung to resist organic replication— you may think us shameless to seek some godless corner of the universe, a place where we can lay dark and dormant, where our voices can’t be picked up on radar—I’d argue there is no place for peace, no space that has not been colonized by theology, by the far reaches of raphaelites, no galactic bed to worship our trajectory—entropy isn’t everything, not when there really isn’t much of a difference between hot and cold, not to starry fingertips travelling across eons, trying to figure out why they can’t feel snow anymore—my ill hands become solstice, her stable love, returning each year to see what fruit can be wrought from that cosmic spring—what makes a wanderer but need, that orbital pull of antimatter to star bodies to outer crust, seeking quarks where they sprawl different, in hammocks of flesh not unlike our own—you would think space lonely, but I call it ours   this place between planets         free from sonder.

hatshepsut

before I smile for you

I have to be buried

woman’s mouth walled

embalmed waking

they removed my organs

early to make room

for my silence

I do not fear the tomb 

for I was born squealing

interred in expectations

female melancholy

is an ancient practice

kohl x marks on 

unfettered cheeks

little girls can only 

run in the afterlife

tear up their skirts

show gods their ankles

the eternal playtime

of too-young queens

purer in passing

than childhood

lay me damp before I go

let me rest in the only

place I have built

for myself

I want to find a reason

that is not birth sleep

or bent weeping

to rest supine

grant me a grin

rightfully mine

This story originally appeared in Stonecoast Review Issue 17.

Photo by Joshua Woroniecki.