est. 2022

ISSUE 2: ADAGIO

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ALORAH WELTI

issue ii issue ii issue ii issue ii issue ii issue ii issue ii issue ii issue ii issue ii issue ii issue ii issue ii issue ii issue ii issue ii issue ii issue ii issue ii issue ii issue ii issue ii issue ii issue ii issue ii issue ii issue ii issue ii issue ii issue ii issue ii issue ii issue ii issue ii issue ii issue ii
To Clare, About Time
Alorah Welti | poetry
characters created by Audrey Niffenegger
Sister mine,
I’m sure you know
Time has been a cruel mistress
this bleeding hour.
She’s weaving with a hexed rope,
playing with knives,
and putting dishcloths
in the gears again.
But those men of ours seem too caught in the weft
to see her room with many doors.
Only one truth, Clare, I bet Henry says.
Ha. I’d like to see him try.
Some nights, I wish I could pull them from the vat
and empty the house of my longing,
but I can’t. We don’t get a calendered love, Clare.
We get the catch.
With all the Clares and the many Henrys,
not everyone can afford a meadow.
Dreams come cheaper.
I would know.
Juno and I Know
Alorah Welti | poetry
for Tori Amos
Red mistress, candlemaker,
I see you in Delgany again,
riding Mary Magdalene’s black mare
all the way to England.
I’d live there too, honey,
if Persephone would let me swing it.
What an aching language,
what a fertile set of stairs.
Red-haired myrrha,
wounded to bleed the gum.
I know it is insensitive to speak of such things.
Forgive me, priestess,
I’ve heard that in the hollow death,
everything is the worst thing;
the silence, the sound, their delicate loam.
I tried to dress you in amnion skins,
in layered veils of chorion heavy enough
to keep the babies in
but I was unborn then,
and you hadn’t yet taught me
how to tie the knots and pray the colors.
It is better now.
Half animal, half instrument–
I don’t remember what it’s like
make a pact with the piano,
but I’ve made a pact with you.
You are my red inheritance, Tori.
A woman’s gift,
truer than all the others.
So let’s go to that other country of yours
and speak of Lucifer and lust.
Let’s weave the heat and weigh our longings
in Ereshkigal’s living room.
We can laugh and sing for her,
and for all the girls yet to come.
Alorah Welti (she/her) is a Minnesota-born feminist, synesthete, poet, and artist. Her work has appeared in Anti-Heroin Chic, lavender bones, Rejection Letters, Lit. 202, and elsewhere. She is a recipient of the Daniel Manacher Prize for Young Artists. She lives on stolen Mohican and Wabanaki land, just north of North Adams, Massachusetts, with her family. You can find her on Twitter at @alorahsky.