BRINK

by Alex Braslavsky

BRINK

I’m talking about the size of my grilled
cheese on Valentine’s Day in 2022.
I’m bleeding every month. Men
can wear as many goose puffers as they want.
In a single day, I have wasted so many darts.
A pom-pom appears on the ottoman.

In a trice, after orbiting the womb,
I was begging for never. I wanted to be
stillborn. I wanted to live between active
and passive voice. To count lava piles,
with a love for foxes and magnetic fields.
To fuck around, let you fix
my website and my toilet seat.
And I’ll build a new arm with a pipe cleaner.

This field I’m sitting in. This wind
the wick choked on, how I turned sane
with waste in my palm. The dawn
over my knees with its simple
digressions of rain. Pain, tell me where
my body’s allotted. Clarity, all the while,
knit your scarves out of dog fur, yank jute
twine, joke about the footnote.

This nightmare spreadsheet dragging
my time in with an undue chord. Choose
between an egg and a glowstick. I would stay
away from dances where someone has to
hold your hand until your hand heals
completely.

Poet Alex Braslavsky is a poet, scholar, and translator working towards her doctorate at Harvard and working on Polish, Czech, and Russian poetry. She is the translator of On Centaurs & Other Poems (World Poetry Books, 2023) by Zuzanna Ginczanka. Her poems appear in The Columbia Review, Conjunctions and Colorado Review.

Artist Mirka Walter is an emerging visual artist from Cologne, Germany. Mirka is greatly influenced by surrealism and feminism. Remedios Varo and Leonora Carrington should be mentioned here. She experiments with watercolor. In the past year, her art has appeared in more than 10 publications and exhibitions. You can find her on Instagram at @mirku.malt.