Feature image by Megan Diddie, You Breathe For Them and They Breathe For You, 2014. Watercolor and ink on paper, 22 x 15 in. © Megan Diddie.

How you grow my hairs from your own body.
How you pull them out until I am nothing.
How my love transpires into wind.

At the deep of me is a graveyard of live
cabbages. The cabbages are so good,
especially in the sea hour. Their scales

slink dangerous as your feral cat garden.
Our wedding gifts have long, worn monkey
arms, they swat from the branches.

The antelopes in my eyes feed & feed
on your beauty. Your beauty is catching,
all my antelopes are on fire & ruined.

The future wears furs,
carries an icicle.
Open her robe,

& you’ll see her body is a dull knife,
her heart a bell jar beating with a clock.
She bites us open, my cabbages moan

& swim back to the sea. I have no dead
yet, my net teems with splendid fish.
It is heavy to have so much, heavy
to eat so many feasts before they spoil.

Taisia Kitaiskaia

Taisia Kitaiskaia was born in Russia and raised in America. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Pleiades, jubilat, The Missouri Review, Juked, Gulf Coast, West Branch, Phantom Limb, and elsewhere. Recipient of a Michener Center for Writers fellowship, she is the current managing editor of Bat City Review and the medium for Ask Baba Yaga.