Jane-Rebecca Cannarella
Visit me like Elizabeth did:
lying in wait, quiet for many years
emerging like the debris
from a car crash in one brilliant burst.
Placing hands like a preacher
concerned about our “earthly encounters”
like the terminator, she’s warning us–
of whatever it is that might be.
But, Elizabeth, will my bare
thighs kill you? Or is death
likely containment in a vessel,
like how plants die in indoor prisons.
She is taking bits of bites
shaping them into words:
all of them daggers.
Elizabeth rooted a bird of paradise in my chest
but when it grew its beak was misshapen;
and I’ve seen an injured mourning
dove in the parking lot of a train station,
but I never once thought it would attack me.
Jane-Rebecca Cannarella (she/her) is a writer and editor living in Philadelphia. She is the editor of HOOT Review and Meow Meow Pow Pow Lit, and a former genre editor at Lunch Ticket. Jane-Rebecca is the author of Better Bones and Marrow, both published by Thirty West Publishing House, The Guessing Game published by BA Press, Thirst and Frost forthcoming from Vegetarian Alcoholic Press, and Eleven-Hundred forthcoming from Really Serious Literature.