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.