Because You Prayed for Me in Fifteen Languages
by Karissa Morton

where the skyline is gaseous and candied,

             soft like wading pool algae,

daisies of a forgotten civilization

             wave triumphantly among collapsed beehives.

 

here we stop,

             hold each other like marooned space travelers,

our lungs percolating

             with mercurial sighs we call consequence.

 

papier mâché tulips

             serve as subterfuge for disappointed saints,

their home-spun prayers

             ensnared in abraded wheat fields and diluted by icemelt.

 

we gaze through your father’s old binoculars

             as if to bring the clouds closer to our bodies,

you clutching my left wrist

             where we both know that dull throb will stubbornly remain.

 

we pray to the cryptic silences of the churchyard,

             and i look to heaven

as you’d look to bunched-up birds

             flying at a height you can’t quite comprehend,

 

you reciting scripture like a theatre of foreign syllables,

             your graceful, delicate scent

running its fingers up and down my suffering

             as if it belonged to you and your god.

 

 

Bed Sheets & Typewriter Keys

consider me a book

and use your lips to obscure my barcode

as you bend me at the spine,

your favorite pages

becoming familiar with fingerprints

that cause my syllables

to sing like kite strings

and insulate me with shadows

that rub like knife-nick and burlap

against your knuckles.

 

a soft calamity

inches beneath my skin

as you kiss each typeset bone

as gentle as a firefly

across Underwood keys,

as heartbreaking as

the wreck of a model train.

 

if the mosaic of my binding

reflects like DNA,

the code will lead only to you,

will spell out your name

like kaleidoscope and magnet

stretched across the canvas

of your bedsheets

 

where our page numbers merge

into ocean breath and streetlamp

as you denigrate my bylines

and use your pulse

to curve me into a rhyme.

 

KARISSA MORTON is a student at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, where she is a writing tutor, literary journal editor, and president of her university’s chapter of Sigma Tau Delta.  Her poetry has recently appeared or is forthcoming in PANK, Lyrical Iowa, Words-Myth, Flutter, Breadcrumb Scabs, Fogged Clarity, Counterexample Poetics, Splash of Red, Leaf Garden Press, Alba, and Clockwise Cat.

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