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Blue Bottle Journal
poetry with sting

Yucca

18/3/2022

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Picture
by Sienna Taggart

paperbag bush, prickly poppies,
              creosote
              ironwood
blue phacelia               bitter root
—the desert’s offspring sewn together,
rustling            whispering their brisk secrets
up the mountain.
I taste them on my tongue when
rain beckons and calls
              feel them on my palm,
              their gummy milky sap
drying on my fingertips          I walk
              climbing higher to the Yucca
              with her sugary
              waxed cream flowers sheathed in sharp points,
              roots swelling with sudsy pulp;
I stand before her threadlike neck
              concealed behind a bladed fan
              cup my hands
              as wind pulls velvet tears
              from her cheeks. 

Sienna Taggart (she/her) is a Creative Writing and English student. Her work has appeared in Dundee University Review of the Arts and The Ekphrastic Review. Sienna lives in El Paso, Texas, with her family and spirited pup, Ronin. She can be found on Instagram @siennaraine_
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Infidel

7/3/2022

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Picture
by Tom Brami

When in poverty, your altitude becomes familiar,
and you realize the difference between being short
and being short of thrift. You fly and think of falling
 
into the spiral of earth without obligation of forming belief,
like a peach prone to bruising. We are all air bound,
arranged in failure and moving. Observe
 
her husband below. Right now, he’s changing
by walking the feet to an invisible line.
He is a kind of glass she held to the sun,
an emergent quality present in ways or degrees.
 
In the future, you will recognize your face
as a groper probing a fisherman’s hand.
You’re a boy crawling into a crevice to sleep.
Anemones stain the sea; birds are lost in migrating sand.
You use them as half buried pillows.
 
Outside you, a ship is casting a frost
that freezes the ocean. The snow is calm
and reddish, prone to bruising.
 
Wreathing clouds are suspended on a sphere. 

Tom Brami is an Australian writer and filmmaker working on a PhD in Madison, Wisconsin. His poetry can be found in Of/with, otoliths, Futures Trading, Southerly, and Foam:e.  
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