Two from The Land of Missing Children by Carole Symer
Art by Monica Banks
Ars Poetica w/Oxygen Tank
a slow gesture at first I start w/my sad girl face Mama’s wan smile
that boys fall for the coldness of her waves the sheer drop
of my eight-year-old chilly prophecy not knowing better I jump into Sister’s burning lake
grabbing her wrists oxygen tank on my back exit plan in place every single time
it hurt to watch Sister surrender whatever loss of tongue in the shape of a gun
or was it a ballpoint swept from her hand & other ghosts changing us beyond perception
like Mama back on meds how I used to cry an artificial reservoir my heart a massive crater
wild pink & orange verbs a set of goggles & instructions for diving into a sunset if you’re lucky
you don’t forget that pain unleashed the people we were living on beer & houseboats
Mama getting the upper hand again I mean what phase of over were we turning the bed this way
or that after our myths blew up & there’s me a wordless body
crying at a paper wall wanting to be somebody else playing dead
as Sister circles her wreckage for someone to believe her I dive deeper to write my turbulent
wake where her fiery wounds pool ink like pinpricks I keep my legs moving
Carole Symer is a practicing psychologist and teaches at New York University. Her essays, reviews and poems have appeared in Across the Margin, The Adroit Journal, Black Fox Literary Magazine, Dunes Review, Laurel Review, Midway Journal, Mutha Magazine, Sky Island Journal, Tiny Wren Lit, Tupelo Quarterly, Wild Roof Journal, Under a Warm Green Linden, and elsewhere. She is the 2020 recipient of the Interlochen College of Creative Arts Scholarship Award, author of the chapbook, Glint, (Harbor Editions, 2021) and a student in the M.F.A. Program for Writers at Warren Wilson.
Monica Banks is an award winning sculptor whose work is widely held in public collections. She creates cakes and other domestic objects out of porcelain, fills them with seed, and documents the birds’ interactions with them.
