‘On the Verge’, ‘Heredity’ & ‘Galveston Bay’

Photographer - Tobi Brun

On the Verge

I discover myself on the verge of an unusual mistake,
whether or not to lean in to the breeze and simply
be carried away on one wind or another to some place
or another where little girls and their mothers sip
nectar from bright white blossoms and there is beauty
in the simplicity of a spear of summer grass.

And it is this that sits, itching at my ears:
What has become of the young and old men?
What has become of me?
Where do I end?
Where am I going and where have I been?

And perhaps it is I, not this bird who beats inside
my chest, that is a bit too tame. Crack the bone of
my breast and peel back the sick and the hurting
and let this one stretch her wings, and maybe
she will be carried away on one wind or another
and I will find myself set down beside my mother,
her soul cool and composed before the horizon
of a million universes.

Heredity

I am half my mother, sipping sadness in the shadow of the moon, but I am not half my father, not
his fists nor his frown.

The other half I am something else, world-rich, filling myself up with all of the things I am not: a
handful of cigarettes, a mouthful of pills, a glass of cold water, a condom, a cat sitting on the
sidewalk corner.

Galveston Bay

What a waste that you came to this slum of a place where we dance and we chase and we drain
out the lake of the grapes and the gray haze of last summer’s grace, where we laugh and we rage
and paint shame on our face, where the girls all in lace with their gay little gaits place a handful
of snakes in a vase and take eight ripened dates off a plate. They wait with their hair all done up
in braids, but the dates taste like paste and the snail on the doorstep is late to the race so they’ve
wasted a day waiting ‘round for their fate. In the garden they’ve taken the down-the-road saint
and hung him by his hands from the spoke of the gate, pinned him in place with a nail made of
jade while they pray and burn sage and it rains in the glade. He goes up in a blaze and in the fray
of the flames they’ve mistaken an angel and misplaced their praise so they cry and they bray but
their wails are in vain -- come the morning what’s left is a gray bit of clay.

Mikayla Silkman is a writer and editor from southwest Connecticut. She predominantly writes speculative fiction and poetry, with the occasional foray into the creative essay. She is also an independent copyeditor. Her work has been featured in Western Connecticut State University's The Echo, Catholicism Coffee, The Hallowzine, and the 2023 CT State Literary Anthology. Mikayla is a devout Roman Catholic, an SVT survivor, and a proponent of literature and the arts. In her free time, she enjoys hiking, playing video games, and cooking. She is currently a student of Western Connecticut State University's MFA in Professional & Creative Writing program. She and her husband, Gordon, currently live in Bethel, Connecticut, and have a rescue dog named Oobi.