by Stephanie Lane Sutton
I greet the sun squinting in the morning as my dog squats
on a leash & it is not the first wince of the day: again, woke
in a room splayed open by light, gazed toward a dream,
half-remembered. In another room, I stretch my fat
against muscle & bone & hope my abdomen
will ache like a faultline ripped open by friction
by this time tomorrow & by this time tomorrow
I will have lived another day between two boulders
smashing together, my head being squished
like the object of some child’s play in perspective.
By now you are the cliff I throw myself from.
Arrival is obliteration. You, a fisherman, hook
snared in my lips you refuse to tug. Wither my flesh
to froth on the waves that claim my body, lap by lap.
Like ghosts, the crests
dissolve into sand, dividing
the sky from the land.
Stephanie Lane Sutton was born in Detroit. Her writing has appeared in in
The Adroit Journal, Anmly Lit, Black Warrior Review, The Offing, Rhino
Poetry, and Thrush Poetry Journal, among others. Her micro-chapbook, ‘Shiny
Insect Sex,’ is part of the Bull City Press Inch Series. She received a
creative writing MFA from the University of Miami, where she was the
managing editor of Sinking City. You can find her doing live interactive
writing on Twitch as @AthenaSleepsIn.