SONYA VATOMSKY
Rhotic asphyxiation |
The safest place to bury a body
is in another body, is in your own body. Is your own dead body inside the one you present to the world, the one that still talks and walks across Pangea because that is how old it is, that is how old faking is. You were born fake as your body came out another fake body, you drank amniotic fluid shots in the belly of the body your mother swallowed when the world told her so and you breathed true breath then and only then. A Russian can’t write a book without nesting dolls; burying ourselves in ourselves is in our blood, our mother’s blood. We birth, we bury, we swallow tongues down the body buried inside the body. Tongue is a delicacy you can serve at a funeral. The safest place to bury a body is at a funeral. |
Herring under a fur coat
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Our misunderstanding was so thick its crumbs are
still here; I'm yet finding the hairs of how little you knew me and the stains do not lift no matter how hard I try, which really hurts because that dress was your favorite, like you’d have me dye the whole thing to match, like that was actually your intention. I didn’t think the wrong idea ruins worse than wine but it does, when you stop drinking just long enough to spill. I stopped for months; talking got more difficult so I stopped that, too. Vodka I never touch at all, unless it's in a shotglass and followed by закуски, small pickled bits that say, yes I am bitter yes, I am I am I am, pass the black bread, the butter, pass it down the length of the table, the width of my face on the night you said, "I think you are falling in love with me" like you'd just read a book on manifesting and also betrayal. I put my coat on. Under, I am cold wet fish, scales and weights, I am wide maw and narrow fin. Mayonnaise to bind, beet for blood and potato-flesh and I've got teeth like you dream of when you drink too much, when you go to the toilet at 3am with your dizzy miscalculations, when you grease the light-switch, stumble, empty your guts on the tile like so many cracked eggs. When you cry for mother, when you can't get back to sleep until you become a different person like that was actually your intention. Our misunderstanding was so thick I say, yes, I am bitter, I say, yes, I say I am. |
Salt is for curing
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Sickness won’t leave. Like an ill-mannered houseguest
it moves my furniture around, leaves messes, takes too-long showers when I’m running late. Yes, I’ve considered “doing something” -- I’ve consulted experts, by which I mean books. Looked up definitions, identified species from photographs. Composed a bestiary of my veins and what fills them (not rivers but panicked rabbits in a warren being gassed). An ethical grotesque. I swell larger in the darkness, dab corpse flower on wrists, smile behind glass with adipocere mouth, forever luscious. Self-preservation is an art and I a masterpiece. The kind of thing you bow before in museums but cross the street at night to avoid. I don’t feel haunted. Exactly. More like a spice jar that’s holding more inside than volume would suggest possible. My little tin lid fits snug but the pressure is really something. I swell larger, dab wrists, powder my nose with sodium chloride. Salt is for curing so never run out. |
SONYA VATOMSKY is a Moscow-born, Seattle-raised ghost and the author of poetry collection Salt is for Curing (Sator Press) and chapbook My Heart in Aspic (Porkbelly Press). They are an asst. editor at Fruita Pulp, where they also review poetry. Find them by saying their name five times in front of a bathroom mirror or at sonyavatomsky.tumblr.com.
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