dancing girl press, 2015
$7.00
Danielle Susi lives in Chicago where she is an MFA candidate and New Artists Society scholar at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Knee-Jerk Magazine, Hobart, The Rumpus, Lines+Stars, DIALOGIST, and Midway Journal, among many others. Recently, Newcity named her among the Top 5 Emerging Chicago Poets. Find her online at daniellesusi.com.
The Month in Which We Are Born
That very-end-of-August
is a scorpion with its talon-ready-tail curled.
Inside this room,
wax torsos linger on shelves
& typewritten pages crawl about on the carpet
as the typewriter itself roosts quietly
observing these hatchlings.
There’s an easel in the kitchen and
deer on the ceiling and
on the porch, knots of wood beams
inhabited by a sloth, an owl, and a cloaked lizard.
In the same way, when my brother was younger
and I was four years older, we would stare at beamed ceilings
for hours, discovering the fish, the faces, the tiny sail-less boats.
We’d go to bed dreaming of the ways lines worked to trick our eyes
and in the morning, find images in our bowls of cereal
***