Desert Islanding in Review
She wears dresses how you’d palm egg yolks: blood-orange
convex cells soft pruning palm-lines. She tells me
solitude is stamps wallpapering over my name on postcards—
as unknowingly as our fathers, two states away, hummed
the same notes (of no particular color) into our mothers’
granite-pitted stomachs. Solitude: if I bonnie-&-clyde—
twenty countries away—how reclusive garbage disposals
caress the round edges of her
hand & wrist—get away aqueous & goosebumped: a Shel
Silverstein drawing of a bicycle. When alone, I read aloud
the spongy grit of buses, catalogue humidity
percolating exhaust & plant feet
with Marquez so they’ll think I’m a local.
Self-Portrait as My Sister’s Double
I’m nancy-drewing my sister’s robust appendix—
a point of contention
between dixie-cup lipstick prints & high neck
sweatered alphabets of half-digested
magazine clippings: dull flashlight apnea.
She imagines she’s a witness to the new
statistic getting knocked up on the pill: collects
paraphernalia—boys without bikes. Sleuthing, I fashion
notes (diligently): magnify-glass eraser bits,
copper shavings, & times
she forgot to jump start a gun, investigating
whether I had chickenpox or just
memorized the citrus in her itch.
Lucia LoTempio is an instructor and MFA candidate at the University of Pittsburgh. She is a sucker for tiny animals and tiny babies. Her poetry has been or will be published in Linebreak, apt, Columbia Review, Berkeley Review, and more. She was a finalist for the Black Warrior Review 10th Annual Contest and the Winter Tangerine Annual Awards. Currently, Lucia serves as Managing Editor for The Adroit Journal, counts for VIDA, and is a contributing editor for Gandy Dancer. Send her words and art: lucialotempio.com