Poetry by Mykki Rios

      Vincent Parsons CC





HOW TO BREATHE UNDERWATER

When I was a child I felt dread
as a storm would descend
So of course, I grew up to love them

The tornado in The Wizard of Oz
once sent my young flesh into a cold sweat
But by high school I would stand

under the spillage of pummeling rainfall repeating
a Japanese homonym, ame with two inflections:
candy/rain, rain/candy

It was so sweet in my hair, on my lips
Fear is something we chew through
like a dried date

or find composition within, as with grief
Like making a grocery list depressed
It’s heavy and sticky and your head aches

but you know there’s something good
lingering from that simple act of planning
to eat again

Knowing you’ll still be there when
the lightning crashes 
and the thunder presses

down
on your sleeping lungs, tempest reviving you,
joyously roaring, ‘CLEAR’






(RE)BIRTHDAY

The ice cream sundae comes to the table with a sparkler embedded. In one clean bite, she eats the pyrotechnics first. The light burns going down, but she swallows. It glints in her hair, her hips, her hooded eyes. For an instant her diaphragm becomes a lantern. She makes eye contact with everyone as she eats the pricking fire. Her friends are not surprised, but there is a respectful silence. There’s plenty of sweet cold to soothe the bright bee stings. She does not dissolve into glitter or foam. She does not burst into flames. She does not lose her voice, or end up a star in someone else’s sky. This is not one of those stories. This is another night marking another year. She survives.



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Mykki Rios is a queer genderfluid Mexican-American poet, performer and multimedia artist. Raised in Chicago, and having lived many places across the globe, they recently returned home to the Windy City. Mykki has had works featured in issues of Welter, Meat For Tea: The Valley Review, Random Sample Review, Smoke and Mold Journal, The Normal School, Apparition Literature, Fourth River Journal, BRAWL Lit, Synkroniciti Magazine, and more. They were also a finalist in Lupercalia Press' 2022 Chapbook Series Contest.