We Throw Hissy Fits in a Heartbeat

by Ariana-Sophia Kartsonis and Stephanie Rogers

 

Because you are great I can say this:
I can’t see all of any horse at once,
however many stares are telling me to.

A window is a yes. The window
and lying in bed on a Sunday morning
by the milk of the sun.

If I offered up my bell and bones to you, Boy,
then comes the really beautiful part:
pennies between the seats of my car.

Underneath a face that would destroy us,
we throw stones at the sky and miss, I go home.
Pause. Reply, then rinse. With your help I disappear.
 

[Sources: Mona Lisa Saloy, Tracy Philpot, Chloe Honum, Rachel Wetzsteon, Marc McKee, Martha Silano, Karina Borowicz, Lisa Glatt, Wendy Xu, Gary L. McDowell, Lisa Buscani, Bob Hicok, Ander Monson]

 

 

Pressing Half Moons Into the Sill

by Ariana-Sophia Kartsonis and Stephanie Rogers

 

Blue-mapped hands grip the wheel, refuse
the eyeball rolled beneath the lid. Purse of lips,

like a hothouse nectarine.
Chances are you will not see a single ghost in your lifetime

out here in this leggy light
in its hard heat. I am dumb with wanting

to pace a cramped, dingy, rented room then make
your face so unlike what I desired in winter.
 

[Sources: Carolyn Forche, Christina Olson, Kevin Prufer, Peter Kline, Sarah Manguso, JoAnn Balangit, Sandra Beasley, Phebe Davidson, Jeff Clark]
 
 

Ariana-Sophia Kartsonis is the author of “Intaglio” (Kent State University Press, 2006), which won winner the Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize, and “The Rub,” which was recently awarded the Elixir Press Editors’ Prize and was published in 2014. She teaches at Columbus College of Art and Design where she is the faculty advisor for Botticelli Literary/Art Magazine.
 

Stephanie Rogers received her MFA in Poetry from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in publications such as Ploughshares, Mid-American Review, Southern Review, Third Coast, Pleiades, and Best New Poets, among others. Her first collection of poems, “Plucking the Stinger,” is forthcoming from Saturnalia Books.