When you spoke

“Two” by Emily Rankin

Waves blew
through the canals
my mother prayed for. Left me

drum-struck. I was in the kitchen
tearing apart a pomegranate,
the one that cracked

off the neighbor’s tree.
How heavy
can sound really be?

The smallest bones
I have trembled
for you. Always

to turn jelly-kneed liquid sunshine
in the water. Spiral through shell,
reach nerve. Become Word.

Your waves don't caress
the shore and so I hate
your certainty. On the phone, fights

are quick because I swallow
in me what likes destruction.
It ripples and breaks

in silence. To prove a point I left you
a pomegranate, just beginning
to burst, red mottled

against the gray counter. Outside,
the crows rudely announce
their flight to nighttime

roost. I wonder what I have
to announce. You’ve gone and everything in me
rings hollow. Now hundreds of miles

inland I smell the stench of the sea.

About the author

Grace Freedson Ribeiro is a painter and poet who lives in Los Angeles and São Paulo. She is interested in how art interacts with the landscapes in and around us. Grace's poetry and artwork have been published in Wild Roof Journal, Kitchen Table Quarterly, StreetLit, Liminal Spaces, and Párrafo Magazine. What she hopes most of all is for her poems to give a little breath back to the world.

About the artist

Emily Rankin was born in Riverside, California and attended university in Texas, where she received a BFA in 2011. Her body of work deals with the tangles of human emotion and understanding, the intuitive messages of dreaming and subconsious exploration. Her work has appeared in such publications as Gasher, Wild Roof Journal, Raw Art Review, Meat for Tea, Hey I’m Alive Magazine, and Rattle. She is currently based in New Mexico. www.eerankinart.com