Author Archives: Krysia Jopek

The brain wanted to be skin that healed quickly. Skin wanted to feel abstractions like hierarchy or revenge. Stars wished upon falling humans. Someone waited at the bottom of the stairs to catch the subject of the study. There was … Continue reading →

The moon is venting tonight. The clock sticks to its rungs. You’re swimming underwater toward something prehistoric. Climbing a hill that doesn’t go anywhere through cloud. No one visits that many miles away from the setting sun. One hand can … Continue reading →

Some of the dead keep growing old with us. They watch us breathing green light after a storm, playing word games none of us wins, paying dues in a strange currency that fell under the sea. The loneliness was too … Continue reading →

The garden, a micro-wasteland: cracked ceramic and glass; peat moss gone amok with ice, tangle, and quandary. Mourning doves thread dirges into blackbird noise; the blue jay cry, a semicolon. Let’s pretend to be yellow, he said—the yellow of daffodils; … Continue reading →

It’s true. I’m a con-Artist. I can’t pinpoint on the calendar the day–or on the wind-up clock, the hour this new identity coalesced, grew into its genetic paws. Strangely, I’m not one iota ashamed. I daresay I might be off-the-chart … Continue reading →

Unhinged from the ceiling, the gray moth was wind-scatter by Tuesday—then nothing left. Not even a frame for a sentence-shed. Last winter’s bicycle spokes catch a hand. Everyone in a hurry to take the remote—until then. Orphic chords scrambled us … Continue reading →

sinuous, serpentine, spongy, soggy, drowning under water, not serendipitous, not a sinecure with a quick fix, not erect at my unstrung cello, not perpendicular at the untuned piano’s yellowing keys the cat walks across at night emboldened with the power … Continue reading →

Everyone slows down and locks the rearview mirror when the ambulance arrives. Demise crosshatches the body’s sleeves. How funny I look without skin. Lacking the memory of other cells, the cell is lonely. Inconsolable, the violas slip the page. A … Continue reading →

1 dancer [hazel] I slept in the Book of the Dead and woke with parchment scrolls blooming tired magnolias from my unhinged mouth. Lugubrious cellos attempted to climb me back to the mud-encrusted, brick floor–but I panicked. When my thinking … Continue reading →

I wanted to go there but I can’t remember—to be with someone lost in the field of wildflowers—that disappeared when I touched a memory that confused the horizon. The address of the doctor who promised not to cure me but … Continue reading →