Crystal Anderson
Woman as scrubbed clean plate:
prone on her back, garnished
in sushi, fruit, leaves so still,
body in the cold room, becoming
the hard chill, rolls of food serve as
her only armour.
Her dress too much,
too little; sashimi
lightly stuck to her
skin, peeled away
until her torso, limbs are more
bare and potential.
Clientele permitting, extending
a rough kind of benevolence,
she might keep the Y of her body
nestled under a banana leaf,
surely appetite meets limitation
before divesting her of every
docile detail.
She is rare -
no -
This is rare
The ghosts of salarymen
haunt elsewhere;
yakuza loiter on hand
here with intrusive prodding
as these are men that think
they own her borders,
interiors and all. Warming
sickens the fish some say-
her body's delicate
counteroffensive.
She cannot be clean
enough for the everyday.
The idea of human
salvers, charade of reticent
art causes this bowed
string of islands
to blush
Alexis Child
I am interrupted by a stranger's shadow
picking patterns in chaos, tense as a violin
string under the unyielding weight of serotonin's
symphony. The imperious conductor's baton
shivers and spins a whirling dervish of words,
screaming through my hair and blood, surging
wildly like a lash of electric bolts through skin.
The whipping wind of steel-and-hooves fight
against unbreakable bonds chaining him in mind.
Without rule over his spirit, he is broken down like
a city without walls. The obscured eyes of Jekyll
and Hyde fall into distinct darkness hiding the sun,
and only sudden exposure to light will spare our life.
