by Patrycja Humienik

i keep close the intonation of my name
spoken in my mother’s voice. there was a time
i let people mispronounce it. i don’t

remember the sound of my grandfather’s voice. i’ve lost
the word for the flower i could be, impatient
blossom, used to never wear lipstick, now i smear

shades of azalea on my lips, i kiss everything, i leave
a mark. invocation. as in: a prayer i want
to repeat. the physicality of it: prayer, kissing, echoes

of a younger me. trying to be approved of.
i’m not saying i am better now. i look up how to say
anchor in my first language. once i didn’t need

to search. kotwica. my mama gave birth to me
a month after my parents arrived in the states.
nie mówiła wtedy po angielsku. it was

her first time on a plane. i know nothing
of ground, of letting the ship sleep.
i fly for hours to visit. if i could

bind myself to a place, put cut flowers in a vase,
i would thank my mother that way. instead
i pour the petals out.

*This poem won Third Place in the SWWIM For-the-Fun-of-It Contest.

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by Patrycja Humienik

the townspeople name the mouth delusion

i.
who raised you?
stumbling into the meat of the
afternoon downhill uphill

kettle left howling on the stove
that mouth running into evening
with a sciomancing tongue

ii.
if the poem is a mouth the
kettle a burning bright apricot
held softfirm like syllables

which is to say there’s something
ripe and howling in my mouth

iii.
somewhere/someone/follows
the rules no questions asked

iv.
the bathtub filling up with milk
somewhere a shipwreck
all honey-roses-styrofoam

7000 plastic ducks
traveling into the high arctic

i try to remember which pill on which day
every day seven+ cargo ships sink

v.
somewhere/someone/shuts/up

vi.
here i am/glistening/in this plastic fleet

old-growth vines ensnake the tub
little limbs i soak in balmy time
i sugar scrub the dead things
such that shedding is no litany

sugared no softer doing what you say
and you didn’t have to say it out loud

vii.
the you is imagined
though the mouth could be
yours the poem is not owned
it runs uphill downhill not
away from us but toward

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