Two Graves
Worm bifurcated into a twin self. Janus
facing two guillotines. Orphan of a
Mother who, by the end, could not
speak. Firmer, the firmament. Shriller,
the music of the spheres. Fed wolves offal.
Adorned my skin with sinew, prostrated
my neck. There was the softest arpeggio
of Teeth, the scratch of a tongue.
Empires rose. Empires were quelled. I
was relieved into a series of eroding
Psyches cast into the Tower’s
entablature’s frieze. Summer swelled to
fine frost. I attended each Dawn in the
white days of the long durée, watching
out the window, weeping shadows,
deserter but at arms, as the imperial
Guard marched to and fro on the
ice-locked streets. I wasn’t anyone. I
wasn’t anything anyone was looking for.
Rumor of rumors. Fog of fogs. I
cultivated an oasis of fevers. Sowing
Salvia. Growing Glory. Rations of a
psychic weather. To narrow the hip, I
went fast into myself, protruding the bone.
I was weighed. I was found
wanting. O, I could just imagine my
Record Keepers later on: doll lost her
mother. doll lost her song.
I Had Nothing to Wear
Grist for the millstone of Decadence,
I had a party to make. Ground-birthed, deep over, shallow under,
my father was Rib, my mother, Everything-Is.
I paraded around my chambers in furious skin.
An aspen’s living fire draped my Nudeness.
Wisdom tasted of blue velvet and milk
chocolate. Body levitating in daemonic wind, fingers arched, I descended, fashionably
parched, down the imperial staircase.
Nothing, like a well-sought-after suitor,
stepped into the Ballroom of Matters.
Night fizzed at the windows. A masqued man bobbed for a black apple
in a basin of oil. I laughed bubbles as Nothing extended a white-gloved hand,
asking for a dance.
Etiquette, naturally, enticed.
I treated him to prisms in the dinner
of my mind, swung wide, head up, raptured. In the rafters! Rose and green
Angels! The music rhapsodic!
The party aswing! Bravura, the velocity delicious!
He brocaded me into the absence
caught in the wind-naked world
I forgot I lost. We waltzed, fordrunken, drumming
the harpsichord’s baroque pattering. The ivory chandelier blushed.
Leaving, Nothing said.
The ballroom emptied into midnight’s hall, and the circles we traced with our feet
became black holes into the green pastures of Arcadia, realm of Simplicity,
where Nothing waits for Eve.
Skinning The Rabbit
A mind that isn’t mine. A veritable puzzle box.
Haunted amygdala. Once was enough through
that vertigo chamber, blitzed by the harrow of
a wind so dappled with time spent drawing a
desolate landscape. I swallowed an elegy.
Choked down breath. Two months after my
mother died, I returned a no-one in the center
that mattered. Never have I bellied through dirt
into a green heaven before. Land asunder. The
earth never now imagining, forever still
birthing. One foot for luck. Two for more luck.
Seeing through a milk-muddled oculus. I’ve
gotten paler. I’m counting down. My mouth a
door opening rooms too small for largeness,
too large for smallness. My mouth a door to a
time better arrested. My language Victorian,
my speech ignored. An exile from life, from
that closed fist, from pedestrian mourning:
people die all the time. Count me out. I stole a
pocket watch. Covered bruise. I am the girl in
blue wielding the hatchet. I am Alice skinning
the rabbit. The girl stuffing her hands in her
dress pockets until all of her is Inside, gone for
good, like my mother, just like that.
Thou Mastering Me
Cruel nude of the aspirant
Life’s aperture whip Nary a skin left
I ran right off that cliff Screen’s a lyre
light-seducer for your movable pupil
Never reveal what’s under your filmslip, mother said
Bound in the ballet of the no-more
woman I relevé into the mind made up mad
An image resembles an image
I am and I am
not-identical to myself — typical of the lover
pursued Feet leave new speech
whenever they tread Swear, it was/wasn’t me,
I don’t care if I’m dead Thou mastered me,
Signifier Recover my cadaver I rewind forever—
*title taken from Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem, The Wreck of the Deutschland
About the author: Temperance Aghamohammadi is an Acolyte of the Exquisite. A trans Iranian-American poet, medium, and critic, she is the author of BATTALION SHAPED GIRL (DISCOUNT GUILLOTINE, 2025) and Behnt (New Delta Review, 2026), selected by Dorothea Lasky as the winner of The New Delta Review Chapbook Prize. Her work appears in The Kenyon Review, The Yale Review, New England Review, Fairy Tale Review, Worms Magazine, and elsewhere. She is an associate editor at RHINO Poetry and was a Claudia Emerson Scholar at the 2025 Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Hailing from the Northeast, she currently haunts the Midwest.
About the illustrator: Miss Jaws is Jessica Garcia; an artist and illustrator currently residing in Indianapolis, IN. She earned her BFA in Illustration from Ringling College of Art and Design in 2016. She specializes in digital and traditional art to create stylized works that tell stories centered around gender, socialization, and culture. Miss Jaws has been featured in publications such as Forge Art Magazine, Mieux, and VoyageMIA. Her illustrations and comics have also appeared in The New Yorker and Eater Magazine, in zines produced by art collectives (Fem)Power (of Miami) and Mujeristas Collective (of New York City) and independent publishers such as Josei Press, Radiator Comics and Isolated: A Pandemic Comics Anthology. Her art has been shown in exhibitions such as 2018’s Beauty Conscious group exhibition at the Girls Club warehouse in Fort Lauderdale and BUTTER 2023 in Indianapolis, IN.
