Fingers hooked, he and I hook the corner. A heel clip-clops then flounders in the dark. I face the window; the building a face. The door yawns. Broken blinds let light escape onto the street. A constant static. What else is there when a clenched-jaw warning melts into two fingers V-ed and vanishing inside? Sometimes, I wish my body would vanish without crumbling. I would say goodbye brain, my tiny Chernobyl. Glowing, eerie, he is saying, Shut the door, so I do. What makes a building a ruin is its countless openings— not nothingness, but suction. The missing molar filled with the tongue’s gummy roll.
B Rivka Clifton is the transfemme author of Muzzle (forthcoming, JackLeg Press) and the chapbooks MOT and Agape (Osmanthus Press). They have work in Pleiades, Guernica, Cincinnati Review, Salt Hill, Colorado Review, The Journal, Beloit Poetry Journal, and other magazines. They are an avid record collector and curator of curiosities.
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