Poetry by Rachel Grace Mussenden

                        Alexander Rabb CC




Late Summer, 4:23 am

The night yawns open-mouthed
and quiet. Outside

the window, the gasp of dawn, the opposite
of a cliff;

a swallowing darkness, a precipitous fall into
Light. Below the horizon

the sun hangs like a threat.
I can smell it. There is a lunar calendar in the soft

meat of my belly. I  count each tiny moon
my fingernails left behind. Years pass

or something like a year. Something like a wave
swells in my throat

and subsides. Low tide and I
am a tangle of salt and bone. Seagrass 

threatening to turn putrid in the heat 
if this stinging sea of moonlight 

does not break for me.
I shred the sheet and hang

a thousand white flags in the window. 
They wrap themselves around me 

like bandages, turn bloodred like the dawn
that is just as feral

as I am. Tooth
nail and wrist. Outside

the smell of cigarettes through the open window. 
A car drives past without hurry. 

A dog yelps softly
and goes back to sleep.

​



Eve, Drunk Again

If I break everything, 
then nothing is really broken anymore,

is it? Everything is just a crosssection 
of itself               a biopsy 

of the butterfly who tore itself to pieces
(as butterflies are wont to do 

at the beginning
and the end of things). Look God,

I made a bouquet of it. Look,
I reinvented flowers so 

I can grow my own garden. I can grow apples.
I can grow pomegranates and you 

will not be welcome there anymore 
than I am.

​

Rachel Grace Mussenden is a poet living and working in Philadelphia, PA. No longer spending her waking hours arguing with strangers in bars, she is a firm believer in long showers and grapefruit seltzer. Other work can be found in The American Journal of Poetry, and is upcoming in Glass: A Journal of Poetry.

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