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Issue 1.1 

Summer 2021
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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  

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so many sloshing chambers  

all twitching flasks  

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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 

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the syncopated hiccups of valving claps  

so that a small        a speckled thing                  expands  

 

contracts what       else           is

 

but the daggering      of

stretch marks 

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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 

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cramping tissues in a fibrous birdflight  

this enervated meat

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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. 

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