On Breathing
There are cities inside these oranges. I split them open, showing you pulp skyscrapers and telephone poles. You weave the peel into my wet hair, dropping the braid against my back like a second spine. We’re traveling to a city where we can breathe. A sign at the base of the mountain cries, “Do not resuscitate.”
People leave this town the way light leaves a room when you flip the switch—all at once, not in waves. Water can’t explain anything. We look to the air for answers. We dust each other’s breaths with black salt so we can see ourselves exhaling.
The air swallows old sounds. The stillness keeps out the weather. We string silver keys between telephone poles in an attempt to summon the wind. A man on the corner tells me there are no poems about breathing, only love and compulsion, but the Latin word for “breath” also means spirit. Like children, the stray cats here don’t know they’re breathing.
Pearl Thief
I unhinge a door and slip into a hotel banquet hall. I move unnoticed through the evening as memory, as idea. Glasses clink and laughs cling to the carpet. Veal bones picked clean fall from my fingers and I weave among tables, breaking cakes of cornbread. I steal from a doctor what he thinks he owns. I unclasp a pearl necklace from his wife’s throat. Swallowing her pearls one by one, I take her out for coffee.
Over lattes, the wife gives me honeybees fermented in syrup and lets me pull the pearls from her ears with my teeth. My boats sought her, followed the trail of shells left at her ankles. She drops the bees into hot milk, a remedy for the ache in my jaw, written under her tongue. The thread of her bracelet vanishes—the pearls bounce against the table. I swallow them quickly, become formless, resolute.
Above sound, I move slowly. Through the eye of a needle, I return in time to pick chocolate shavings from glasses of strawberry mousse. I rearrange the silverware as I take the only empty seat. Too many pearls sit at the back of my throat; I cough them into a wine glass where they sit immersed in merlot. “Call the sitter and tell her we’ll be late,” the doctor whispers to me, we’re having too much fun. I am beneath this roof, locked between the halves of an oyster.
Jessica Cogar is a recent graduate of Ohio Northern University's undergraduate creative writing program and is currently a masters student in poetry at Ohio University, where she teaches courses in writing and rhetoric. Her poems have appeared in The Boiler, Sun and Sandstone, small po[r]tions, and elsewhere; she has work forthcoming in IDK Magazine.