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    FLIES

    We begin painting everything itself. Lost insects swirl in hurried circles as the storm starts. Your hand covers a portion of your mouth. In the dump and in the cosmos. A fizzing puddle of seltzer moves toward the ant trap. A cloud streams through dirt detergent haunted jewels as Marguerite Duras watches a fly die. Television on the floor flutters color bars.



    MILK PAINT

    Shaking stranger’s reflection in revolving coffee. Milk and gem. I sit beside my brother and begin to paint on a five by five-foot canvas. Stinger in the cream. The café scene loops. I make the glittermilk spin, paint. More than ever I have to look around me. More than ever I have to look around me more. Than ever I have to look.



    BEFORE VISITATION

    that light swells
    tongue, spleen

    black cherry seltzer
    hisses prodigiously

    confectionary nausea
    crushing frosted flakes

    on the kitchen floor
    calico cat on purple blanket

    and record player
    prostrate angel calendar

    away from Plato’s sun, a gold locket
    dangles high above the dishwater

    in the French film
    Hermès handbag on fire

    uprooted cord of the varnished world
    faux fur coat with gold clasps

    some people will walk through
    that door any minute now

    apple skin on the counter curls
    into paused soda water



    BETWEEN

    Pythagoras heard the voice of his dead friend

    from the mouth of an injured dog

    his mystic cult of math was popular

    a heart drawn around the words

    a human heart in a candy box

    whose hue extracts then spits back

    interregnum between steel and cloud

    a heart is a recording device running loops

    around grandmother’s old house

     

    Emmalea Russo is a writer and artist living at the Jersey shore. Her books are G (Futurepoem, 2018) and Wave Archive (Book*hug, 2019). Recent writing has appeared in Artforum, American Chordata, BOMB, The Brooklyn Rail, Granta, Hyperallergic, Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. A new chapbook, Great Mineral Silence (2020), is out from Sputnik & Fizzle. She’s pursuing a PhD in Philosophy and edits Asphalte Magazine.

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