Magic with Skin On

by Morgan Nikola-Wren

reach into me deep as poetry, tangle my veins into calligraphy

Slow your feet on the street that walks you home tonight. Never mind that the houses around these parts are all hunched together in identical, exhausted heaps. You'll know the one you are meant to find. There is a girl in it. Her slumped silhouette has the shape of the woman she could never quite grow into. And it quivers in the soft, almost holy glow of her window. She is breaking, you see? Practicing suffering like a sacred ritual. Because this girl doesn't know much about muses. And it's killing her, simple as a sharp knife.