Ink & Oak Literary Magazine

The city forgets, but the bricks remember, lungs filled with the dust of another man’s wealth. Your laughter dissolved into smoke each September.

I wrote this like Psalms etched in the sand, A message from the soul, so I hope you’ll understand. I used to marvel at your magic like Strange with the hands, Now your spells feel hollow, generic, and bland.

I AM the child of pyramids kissed by the Nile, An heir to the wisdom that stretches infinite miles. I AM the scribe of Ausar, the keeper of stars, Charting paths through Orion, unshaken by scars.

I like to touch your scars in complete darkness, bend my fingers over the battlefield of your back, reading your flesh with my own, pondering the violence of the life before us. The circle scar on your spine,

the Haw slides slow past brick and bramble moss threads the wheel spokes a broken beam leans like a weaver asleep at her frame

Near enough to but not inside of Kenosha and entirely forgotten by all records seven–thousand and eighty-two plastic eggs compress because Jeremiah Bumthwaite (age seven) has a sloppy swandive

Some nights, the train rattles off the nightstand, following its tracks to the termite-chewed boards beneath our sleep. I have dreamed my friend a face

After the catastrophe, Persephone craves apples, dreams of them, ripe green and gold and crimson, imagines the first tart bite, juice fleeing down her chin.

Roll, roll, roll deep thunder— patient storm.

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