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July 2019

An open balcony, vases, roses, a butterfly dancing. All that. Pristine skies over the balcony and almond flowers on the streets. The dervish still whirls but quietly. Semantics blurred in her mind; she couldn’t distinguish the butterfly’s dance from the dervish’s whirls. The butterfly tattoo on her arm exposed; it’s time to take a selfie, it’s time to take more selfies before the butterfly vanishes   because in the company of butterflies she feels more photogenic.  

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Before you had a name, when you were skin stitched to bone and a pulsing box in the center of the cavity. Begin. You are a child, balancing on the edge of a black pond, on the edge of falling. Begin before the falling. Before you took another body into your body through the oldest wound.   Begin before soldiers, which is to say boys with rifles. Boys with rifles they stroke like women. And the bodies that fall like sacks of flour to the earth. Begin before the tide of bodies, salt stripped from the sea. Before the web with its million wired eyes burrowing into human dirt, into the woman with

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I curl my toes under my thighbones,begging my own body for some warmth.My trembling toes are colder than the waterthat drips on my numb ribs.“Trikuni!”((Let me go))I am screaming,screaming, screamingscreamingto someone (anyone)but no sound escapes my parched lipsfor reasonsbeyond my reasoning Badi may, ya imme((I need water, mother))Itchy concert throats and digesting French toasts. Beyond the windows,the waves break over the timeline of the horizonas a misinterpreted French songslows down the setting of the sun.beneath the windows,invisible, intense spasms of air createa crawling sensation of critters on my back,but quite oddlythere is a familiarity to these jitters thatmakes me want

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