Tuesday poem #265 : Kimberly Quiogue Andrews and Sarah Blake : The Sea Witch Takes A Walk

How long does it take to work through a new linguistics of breathing?

She feels weightless, and she read Kundera once.

She knows the absence of a crushing force can feel like sadness.

She could propel herself to the top of a house.

Instead, she wraps herself around a neighbor’s porch railing,

allows the terrible horizontality of movement to shift her hair, slightly.

A small dog yips at her and the eels hiss. She stands

in her god-form for a second, and in a back yard, a few houses away,

a boy tastes salt water; everything looks wet, threatens to exude.

She corrects herself so dry it won’t rain for weeks.

Kimberly Quiogue Andrews is the author of Between (Finishing Line Press), winner of the 2017 New Women's Voices Series chapbook prize. Her work in various genres appears or is forthcoming in The Shallow Ends, The Recluse, RHINO, The Normal School, West Branch, BOMB, the Los Angeles Review of Books, ASAP/J, Textual Practice, and elsewhere. She is Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Washington College.

Sarah Blake is the author of Let's Not Live on Earth and Mr. West, both from Wesleyan University Press. An illustrated workbook accompanies her first chapbook, Named After Death (Banango Editions). In 2013, she was awarded a literature fellowship from the NEA. Her debut novel, Naamah, is forthcoming from Riverhead Books. She lives outside of Philadelphia with her husband and son.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan