Poetry By Ahja Fox

     Piero Fissore Flickr


Shallow Water Blackout
 
This is a guided meditation,
an acetone wash.
 
Spill arms into water.
If there is none, fill the tub.
Pretend there is seaweed, rope.
 
Brush your skin against its skin.
Remember your mother.
 
No repetitive underwater laps. One lap, breathe.
Breathe and let the head be a click back
of body.
The nervous system, a cnidarian--
coral polyp or medusa.
 
It’s like riding
your bike or a man.
Remember that man
said your mother was medusa
and you bought a snake.
 
You could hold a body
as your mother,
emerald, lamella,
could pretend the rope
is her skin.
 
Let the water be
body to your remembering
of a man stealing your bike
and your mother.
 
Rope is snaking
from the tub out of the door.
 
Breathe. Feel it brush
against your skin,
your nervous system
clicking, ticking
until it remembers.
 
By now you are your mother,
arms spilling out of the tub.
Breathe. You are medusa.
Emerald, lamella.
 
*the italicized part comes from a poster on http://www.shallowwaterblackoutprevention.org




Daughter


You were raised rolling
Your tongue into questions
The size of a boy bloated by breaking
*
I know from experience
How girls sink
Into photos, suddenly                          
And without clothes
*
Your father walked
Tight-lipped, holding days ahead
Like ripped pages
*
They were snatched
By beating
Winds claiming a body
Already gone
*
I saw you
With blue shoelaces
Knotted in your hair
*
You cracked baby Jesus in half
Severed Mary’s arm
As you swept in the shadow
Of a half-ton cross
*
I saw you
With the same blue shoelaces
In a strip club
*
Your legs, latex triggers
To a video store on Dayton
I licked Pop Rocks off that clerk counter
Off the clerk, it burned
*
Does it burn
Roaming the streets
In search of a birthday
Cake crown-splintered by drums?
*
Last year, it was vanilla
Buttercream splitting
Words on daddy’s headstone
*
You sang a song about angels
Holding lost boys in their wings
Another about hanging
From a telephone wire
*
The embalming table
Doesn’t speak
And our tongues lavender twist
Lay low in a ravine
Renamed each time by the last thing
Swallowed
*
I like to be swallowed
By a sleeve
Your juicy fruit clacking a tick tick
Tocking bomb
*
We both woke 
Without our faces
Pulled our teeth out of mud

Ahja Fox is a poet obsessed with bodies/ body parts (specifically the throat). Her tagline is ‘#suicidebywriting’ and her muses are dead things found among the living. Ahja can be found around Denver reading at various events and open mics or co-hosting at Art of Storytelling. She has recently decided to end her educational hiatus and is going for her BA in English-Literature/Creative Writing at UCD. She publishes in online and print journals like Five:2:One, Driftwood Press, Rigorous, Noctua Review, SWWIM , Tuck Magazine, and more. She has also recently been included in the 2018 Punch Drunk Anthology. Follow her on Instagram or Twitter at aefoxx.

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