Vol. 7 No. 2

Fall 2024

Aperture 4
Editor's Note
My Pointe Shoes and Journals Shared a Box Under My Bed
The White Light of Universal Upload, Etc., Etc.,
Mother-Me
A Portrait of the Patient with Anxiety and Cheshire Cat Grin
Aperture 1
Changing the daisies
Accidental Poetry
Rotaried Darkness
Tocolytic Haze
Le temps [Time]
The Disinfectant Girl
Wildfire
Mimosa Pudica
Le temps [Time]
We tore out the garden
Love Sponge
Screw
La natura non ha fretta (eppure tutto si realizza) [Nature is in no rush (and yet everything gets done)]
Aesthesia
Velvet
Worn
La natura non ha fretta (eppure tutto si realizza) [Nature is in no rush (and yet everything gets done)]
Loss
Spaghetti
Ode to My Brand-Name Birth Control
Unless
Incessant Spring Rain
On My Birthday
Degrees of Separation
Iago
Loves Me Some Pizza
A May Morning
The Refugee Camp
When The Spring Sun Shines
Autobiography of Black and White
The Fourth Dimension
Evolution
Echoes of Elders I
Bedside Manner
What I Fear to Discover
We Use Acetone to Clean Beakers as If We Still Prize Purity
Echoes of Elders II
River Song 2
What Otherwise You Might Forget
Flying Lessons
Echoes of Elders III
Who Were You in a Dream?
Roxbury, 1968
Foresight
Mourning
Pain is a Dagger Burning into my Heart
To a Departed Pekingese
Faces
My Daughter, the Volcano
The Apartment, In Its Resting State
Souvenirs
Day of the Goose
Orchid Shadows
Lugubrious
Hide-and-Seek
When the Girl with the Golden Ball rejects young Ewan McGregor’s praise
Pose of Glances
The sky as we (don’t) know it
The Dustrunners
Changed Landscape
Cherry Blossoms
Passages
Migration
Zephyr Sighs
Little Criminals
In August
The Tree of Life
Glyph Aubade
Gravidas
prayer, it might be called

We Use Acetone to Clean Beakers as If We Still Prize Purity

Each woman in chemistry lab for the first time
unscrews the bottle of acetone and smells
the shame of home, the crisp shriveling shock back
to nail polish remover on hardwood furniture,
cotton balls and girlhood and pretty we won’t
want to let last. Washing beakers, I am in my best
friend’s bed as she paints. I am in a Catholic church,
matching plaid uniforms, the priest cleaning
sacred vessels. Baby-faced blue, silver chrome,
lipstick red, she picks the polish from each nail,
lacquer dandruff in the pews, as he tilts beads
of holy water to catch the last precious drops
of blood wine, chalice clutched tight with both
his hands. I mirror the sway, the swirl in this metal
room where vents drone an organ’s harmony and know
all these places are the same place. All these
motions echo us home, cut to the hidden pink
of flesh beneath, still schoolgirls in plastic gloves.

Share!