The 2River View | 25.2 (Winter 2021) |
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Rachel Stempel Good Bone a good bone broth disorients. in your mouth as you read this. you can feel it distance. with the flesh peeled back you smile: it’s the closest you get to being i hear a dentist becomes a dentist when he fails culinary school. Stillwater Threats My house was built elevated. I thought better of myself then. My house was built on failed foundations—like all good origin stories: swollen. Waterlogged & no longer skeletal. The frame, bloating, is fed well / is stoic. Wet wood flakes like yeast, like rusting underwire: several failed foundations at once. When you anger a mother she turns her neck. She breaks it with a strength only a mother has. When you anger a mother, she punctuates the papers. She punctuates—with chrome-lined billabong—the driveway. The cul-de-sac offers endless dead ends. Stillwater threatens my energy level. To irrigate is irritating so stagnant I stand, toe-dip to dive into pools, abandoned. Where has their mother gone— their mother, a river meander, takes care not to upset her sleeping My house is far from a tipping-point but as a mother I’m not. I want Rachel Stempel is a queer poet, educator, and staff writer at Up the Staircase and EX/POST MAGAZINE. Their work has appeared in or is forthcoming from The Nasiona, Penn Review, Porter House Review, and elsewhere.
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