Image: Kenzie Allen

The rock only has a mouth and eyes in the desert. Crush up shards of glass for the rock’s drink;
bite down until the rock turns to liquid sapphires, blue as royal sea slums, blue as diving sticks.
The enamel chips and gums are left gnawing. Feel something other than the violet noise and
wash your gum holes with gasoline; swish it, and geology will dissolve like minerals, sand-sifted
through eyelashes. There’s an acrylic pond in the center of this, with a Lego palm. The stone
cries: “My eyes are plastic.” The desert cries: “My eyes are plastic too.”

 

 

     

Ellie Slaughter

Ellie Slaughter won the Roy F. Powell Creative Writing Award in Poetry (2011) and has been published in Anthropoid, NonBinary Review, and The Miscellany, as well as elsewhere. She is an MFA student at Lesley University and currently works as the prose editor for Sling Magazine while interning at VIDA: Women in Literary Arts. In May 2015, she participated in Tupelo Press's 30/30 project. Currently she lives in Salem, MA with her daughter.

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