Aurora Shimshak

Aurora Shimshak grew up in several rural communities and small cities in Wisconsin. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Best New Poets 2023, Copper Nickel, and Poetry Northwest, among others. She teaches writing to undergraduate students and those incarcerated at Oakhill Correctional Institution. Her first poetry manuscript, Home Movie of a Girl Not Swimming was selected as a finalist for Milkweed's Ballard Spahr Prize.

Thalassophobia

Mississippi: favorite monster,

dumb slug, ceaseless

factory of stomachs.

Once there was a river,

and the river had no face.

Once there was a girl

and the river laughed.

Not just the river

but the bridge, a stomach—

lining of iron and bolts.

And our car survived it!

In seven invisible bedrooms,

a visible river.

Before I knew tsunami,

I dreamt it. My pupils

bit the teal of the thalamus.

How can the others be satisfied with probably?

What scalp did I spring from shaking like this?

Geography

Wrote Dad for my birthday I wanted World Flags, $3.95. 

An item from a school catalog.

A game kids play with daisies: he loves me, 

he loves—an ache

for the world if nothing else. 

Each flag’s symbol, a stamp 

to mean expanse. Each design, a flapping sky-mark—

this border, this shape, this us I dare you to cross. 

I’d left already my mother’s side. 

When the cops followed us home, I prayed first 

for their mercy, then for them to take her away. 

Deserter, I was charmed by allegiance. I fantasized 

shorelines—ready or not, here I float 

to strangers in my whistling mussel-sucked raft. 

In sleep, the canoe of the body 

shot through with tremors and tendons.

Play theorists say play is when there are choices. 

I snuck to the bottom bunk 

so an edge of me could touch my sister. 

What passes for memory—

the flags when they came were small, 

a garland to frame a bulletin board. 

I want to say I opened them, that I sucked, one by one, 

on their synthetic dyes.

I could tell you I communed this way 

with countries. But they were not 

what I wanted. I would have chosen 

to lose them in a fire. 

Let’s play one thing inside another thing. 

A flag in a girl, a girl in her room, 

her room in a word 

like where. 

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