A black and white illustration of a series of horizontal, overlapping waves.
Original illustration by Anne Le Guern

A tongue beneath an avalanche, I have cracked

the firmament’s mirror, a green screen

over exburbia. I have planted 50 tongues. What a nuisance

these flattened tongues!                  I have torn

the throat of the wind and swaddled

his stillborn twin and wrapped

my enemy’s sutures to pass the scales

of monotonous time.                 Thin red twins,

their mother a black/white abbess. I left

my wound at the office, then tossed

my keys in the recess left by children

who needed an author. This story

is true as all tales are meant

for the listener. The telephone has split

in two: umbilical cord and gloved

doctor. The wind has birthed her shadow.

Lay the gauze across her shadow.

Anna Maria Hong
Anna Maria Hong is the author of Age of Glass, winner of the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award and the Cleveland State University Poetry Center’s First Book Poetry Competition; the novella H & G; and Fablesque, winner of Tupelo Press’s Berkshire Prize. Her poems and essays recently appeared in American Poetry Review, Fairy Tale Review, The Rumpus, Michigan Quarterly Review, Poetry Daily, and American Sonnets: An Anthology of Poems and Essays.