Interrupta: Two
lavender menaces, one spare bedroom girdled by white walls, a dresser, and floorboards a matching vestal bedspread pillowed our uncoiling twice your brother tried to interfere prepped two rooms he said insisted, short of bossing you didn’t care splintered stairs squeaked beneath tiny ghost feet skirring through the layered spite house squeals like feasting pigs clipped the air for angry hours and eventually, through exhaustion, ceased we were, at last, arrested between ups and downs the phantom monkeys to whom adults were rendered dead somewhere else processing the evening: too much Barolo the drunken ruckus your troublesome ex famiglia histrionics in its gamut of pitches and me, the outsider, muted, hand over glass none of it, the stuff of romance things are often not what one imagined in the letch of yesteryear still, your skin stirred a riot in my fingers my heart slipped its skirtings and the rest of the world went mum There was only the curve of your hip, a brushing of lips and how the night undid us *Originally published in Hyacinth Review
Koss is a mixed-race queer writer, poet and artist with work in many journals, including Diode Poetry, Midway Journal, The Pinch, Five Points, Moonpark Review, Moist Poetry, San Pedro River Review, Petrichor, Ran Off with the Star Bassoon, Gooseberry Pie, Chiron, The Fence, South Florida Poetry Review and many others. Their work has been in many anthologies including two volumes of The Dead of Winter, Best Small Fictions, and Beyond the Frame. Find links to their work on their website, and purchase their Lammy finalist chapbook, Dancing Backwards Towards Pluperfect, a Diode chapbook contest winner, here: order Dancing Backwards Towards Pluperfect
Thank you some more, Mickie and Josh for including my work in this series!!! Very honored.