Mackenzie Carignan lives in Broomfield, Colorado, sandwiched between Boulder and Denver. She works at Oracle, managing curriculum projects for (mostly technical) learning initiatives. She has a Ph.D. in Creative Writing from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and has published her poems in dozens of journals including Another Chicago Magazine, Hayden's Ferry Review, fourteen hills, and Columbia Poetry Review. Her full length poetry collection, "a house without a roof is open to the stars," is available from Black Radish Books on SPD or Amazon. She has three awesome, inspiring children and a software developing entrepreneur husband that fill her poems with constant contradictions.

dysphemism

Something put on.
Your origami eyes.
Deliver the animal.
Ecstatic.
Crown the least likely to benefit.
Switch the carving light.
There are animals who hate you.
I am an animal.
When I dreamt of him.
Like cloud.
Like touching me was easy.
He never did.
Then he did.
Where do I go?
Run from the solid, primal animal.
Run.

I am an animal.
I hear you from a distance.
The story had no distance, no directions for folding this flap or that corner.
It was by design.

Remove the keystone.
Again, emblem.
Again, butterfly and the inability to measure.
Listen.
Warm patterns, alternating breadth.
Leaving and going are two very different things.