Issue 1.1
Summer 2021
Carrie Nassif
Reflection:
While watching a live scan of my heart, the valves opening and closing seemed to me to be clapping their hands, or flapping their wings in flight. I wanted to capture that sense of awe at the body’s pulsing strength and delicate fragility.
This Fibrous Birdflight
this frantic this hissing steam
both spire and gorge
as though in really could equal out
how we divide each side
by these two lung sacs
so many sloshing chambers
all twitching flasks
a variegated fetus and its threadbare its throbbing tremolos
let every lub be a mitral wing span every dub
a heaving a feathering flap
these wavering reds murmurating cells swarming
our pouches
the syncopated hiccups of valving claps
so that a small a speckled thing expands
contracts what else is
?
but the daggering of
stretch marks
your blustering intrusions
the steady static of acceptance
of my yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes
fisted hearts straining
clenching wombs spilling life
cramping tissues in a fibrous birdflight
this enervated meat
we these nubbly these warblings
all eat and excrete
Carrie Nassif is a queer poet, photographer, parent, and psychologist with a private practice in the rural Midwest. She lives happily with her partner, their 16 year-old future marine biologist, a very spoiled bearded dragon, an aging but sassy orange cat, and an aggressively friendly 65 pound lap dog. Recent work can be found in The Gravity of The Thing, Tupelo Quarterly, and Pomona Valley Review, featured in AROHO's Waves series, and in several anthologies.
Carrie's Book Recommendation
I'd recommend ]Exclosures[ by Emily Abendroth (Ahsahta Press 2014). It's a masterful collection of rich language and creative form which explores inequity in a unique setting.