by Cassidy McFadzean

Before bed, I count teeth slipping out,
calculate bodies in the high-rise above

As a child, who comforted you
when you woke from sleep?

Did you stand in the doorway,
watching softly snoring faces

too terrified to step inside a room?
Crying a little or a lot,

you run for me the white hot
You were flying home from Tehran

I was bleeding in the bathtub
at the start of the next decade

A toast to this and all other
odds and eclogues

Was it maggot or magnets?
Static or stagnant? No matter—

we cherished each fragment
clasped tight to our clavicles

You visited the Tower of Silence
and returned with copper bracelets

I wore clinking down the aedicula,
songbird ghoori glazed ash-white




*A Tower of Silence or dakhmeh refers to a circular burial tower in Iran where Zoroastrians would leave bodies of their deceased.

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Cassidy McFadzean is the author of two books of poetry with her third, Crying Dress, forthcoming from House of Anansi in 2024. Recent poems have appeared in Afternoon Visitor, Annulet, Hot Pink, Paperbag, and elsewhere.