MORAL INVENTORY
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The solution to your internal bleeding
is to fill yourself with gauze like a teddy bear but this is a terrifying possibility You need to take pills before it seems reasonable The person in the room next to me is reading aloud and she coos like a pigeon or hoots like an owl I can’t tell which bird she resembles through these walls but she is lilting and rhythmic, more beautiful than I could ever be Lately I am all mops and brooms all appliances, all cumbersome I searched my insides but found only glass animals and you think that’d be enough to explain the bleeding but they were whole I search my insides and find only mysteries Pale blue visitors, bright red belts None of this would matter if I had a better body, which is not the same as saying if I was a better person They are easy to confuse, bodies and persons They are less easy to separate I can’t visit you without my body but sometimes I wish I could |
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Larisa Svirsky is a philosophy Ph.D. candidate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in jubilat, Smartish Pace, The American Journal of Poetry, TYPO, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, and elsewhere. She was a finalist for the Erskine J. Poetry Prize. Her chapbook, Mission, won the Sheila Ortiz Taylor Chapbook Competition and will be published by Oia Arts Press.
Tealia Ellis Ritter was born in Illinois and currently lives and works in rural Connecticut. Her work has been exhibited internationally, most recently by Aperture, The New Yorker, at PRC: Exposure, on Women in Photography by the Corcoran Gallery of Art, at The Magenta Foundation, at Catherine Edelman Gallery, by Taschen NYC, and at Humble Arts 31 Under 31 exhibition. Her work has also appeared in many publications, including The London Daily Telegraph, Stella Magazine, Bloomberg Pursuits Magazine, and The Financial Times of London.