by E. Peregrine
Black glass pond. Practice: words
come through page.
No censoring. Flow.
Ice is only on
surface layers. Illusory night.
Always something beyond.
I rise from the mud.
Ancient fish, I rise: fin, eye, lip.
No limbs outside boundaries.
Ice fractals.
Paint-cracked door frame.
All illusory.
Hail, hail the cold glass pane!
It sates me;
I cannot be sated.
Break through water
like a wave of lemon.
Olive oil dances warning.
Jealous, strange eyes.
They do not know the
white candle, copper blade.
Thyme stretches. I stretch.
Morning releases slowly.
‡‡
E. PEREGRINE (they/them) is a transgender conductor, poet, teacher, and Pacific Northwesterner-turned-New England resident. Their writing has appeared internationally in Meniscus, Gold Man Review, Roanoke Review, Abraxas, Variant Literature, Bluestem Magazine, and elsewhere.
Union Spring Literary Review 