Featured Poet: Crystal Ignatowski

       Thomas CC




Phase Change

My therapist says Sleep Now,
but I struggle. Each morning,
I watch clouds give birth,

witness starlings fling themselves 
into figure eights, squint to see 
Andromeda’s red star.

My will says, 
Set me afire 
until I’m atomic, 

which is not a demand,
but a telescopic question 
for my daughter 

to answer. Soon, 
my spine will be a mountain 
instead of a moon. Soon,

she will spit glaciers 
on my chest. I will prepare her 
for my many unravelings, 

static fissures towards a single 
black hole. She won’t understand 
this poem, its bleak debris 

ashing onto the page. 
She’ll watch starlings migrate 
to Mars and float into sunlight 

she can’t name. She’ll whisper 
See you later instead of 
Goodbye. 





Johnny Cash

My knee cap split open 
like a melon. We listened 
to Johnny Cash 

on the way to the hospital. 
I cried. It wasn’t ugly, 
but it wasn’t pretty 

either. When we arrived, 
a mass of people snaked 
through the parking lot;

we didn’t even exit 
the vehicle. Don’t worry, 
you said, My father 

is a doctor, as if 
learned skills could be 
passed down, as if 

you weren’t still drunk 
and over confident 
and in love.

But we didn’t go 
to your father’s. 
We went home.

You carried me 
over the threshold, 
cut a lemon 

for my tired mouth. 
I was just a shell 
of a person then,

trying to escape.
Hold tight, you said, 
not meeting my gaze.

You poked my tender flesh 
with the needle, fished around 

for the other side.





Fog Lines 
            after September 11th

Fifth grade, a foal 
on stilts learning to walk,

and my father trapped 
in an airport far away, 

his voice a woolen whisper 
through the corded phone,                 

and aren’t we all connected by 

small grass fields, 
river oxbows, 
cords 

to our mothers’ wombs. 

I am still sucking on 
my mother’s breast with 

a small tongue, her milk 
like a string of prayer flags 

struggling to wave 
as she witnessed me wriggle 

in the NICU window, my head 
a wire trap, the nurses stern 

like bees. You Can Touch Her 
Tomorrow, they’d say, then tomorrow     
        
the same thing, always tomorrow, 
her nipples puckering to the sky, 

her breasts hardening 
like tempered wings.         

Her hands formed fog lines across 
the ventilator’s window, lines 

she’d remember ten years later 
as her hands reached for the television screen

to cover the New York skyline, 
the smoke pillowing 
the sky, the grayness 
a memory of me. 

​

Crystal Ignatowski's poetry has been featured in Barren Magazine, Four Way Review, Parentheses Journal, and more. She lives and writes in Oregon.

---