Poetry by Sofija Podvisocka

                     ​corrine klug CC



how to be fleeting, and how to regret it

i find that i tend to stay the way a moonflower blooms, never long; instead I often occupy the
space between the dying throes of a dream and consciousness where I am confronted with the
taste of chalk drawn on suburban asphalt that’s only otherwise tasted rubber tires and scraped
knees and rainwater dripping from the tiled roof onto the windowsill, which looks out either onto
a mirror or a house entirely like my own. The asphalt chalk travels from my teeth to my tongue
to the back of my throat like the moonflower, nocturnal, and tickles my windpipe with its sister
ash; I wake up coughing, usually in my bed and sometimes in another, or by the riverside at
noon, or to the end credits in the movie theater across from the grocery store where I only ever
buy overpriced pomegranate tea in glass bottles. When we leave the double feature we hop into
the shopping carts to race each other across the parking lot until one of us inevitably hits a curb
and falls face-first into the asphalt, and when my cheek scrapes against the rough surface I bite
my lip, I taste copper, taste chalk, taste ash; the surface speaks with a hoarse voice reminiscent of
my own, one that reminds me that I’m the childhood friend gone bad, that I distort the roads
melting away with the heat-haze beneath the sun and that I myself stuck the moonflower down
​my itching throat.

​


​
the slug

have you ever been silent, asks the slug, emerging wide eyed from the silk scarf hanging by the
entrance of the thrift store. Carroll-esque, it holds a pipe beneath the no smoking sign and leaves
a trail of slime as if it were Hansel leaving breadcrumbs, black enzymes writing extra zeroes into
the price tag to make sure the number remains too high for its home to so abruptly be displaced. I
run my fingers along the textile only to mistake it for a cocoon from which the butterfly emerges,
Monarch; they whisper in a chorus meant for the amphitheatre, have you ever merely been your
present self? We raised a colony of them in elementary school, their heavy ermine coats wrapped
around their wings pooling on the floor, around the hollow of a throat in which rests hidden a fly
trapped in an amber pendant I once bought in the kitschy souvenir shop by the old town. When I
reach out to stroke the pendants they crack along the leylines left by my fingertips the way the
surface of the river breaks at first rain, or the way the red rash streaks across my palm after I
reach out to grasp at a stalk of what I didn’t know was poison ivy. The fly cracks its knuckles as
it tears away the amber sheets and laughs, voice hoarse from hibernation, have you noticed that
you are always dreaming? and my cheeks burn for days like the streaks on my hands, red and
warm in front of the bonfire they taught us how to start. When my hands heal I collect dried pine
needles grateful that no rain had come before to break the surface of the river, because the wet
never simply rests, it seeps into the flesh of the pine like the fungus in the fell logs scattered
across the moonlit paths between the earthworms that screech in fear as i trip over the dried-out
driftwood. They shine a small flashlight into my eyes to check my pupils, and by now I’m used
to the bugs speaking; I’m more worried about my shoes, soaked through from the early morning
​rain than them asking me, have you ever encountered your own body?

​

Sofija Podvisocka is a rising senior at Brown University studying Literary Arts. She works primarily with abstract writing and prose poetry, has work published in The Round, and currently manages Vagabond Magazine as editor-in-chief.

---