Jalina Mhyana

Veins of ivy scale stones,find footholds butthe caretaker cuts earth short, peels creepers from Cotswold rock and props the deadhead to head so they won__topple like drunkson their moss-soft shadows.

Everything was numbered: the lenses, the painterly sky, the milligrams of my panic pills. I had prescription eyes that allowed me to see better, and prescription panic pills that allowed me to play blind.

He__ always been attracted to broken things. He was the kind of boy who talked the bad girls through their problems, who defended them and didn__ take advantage. He was sensitive to his stuffed animals_ feelings, rotating their position on his bed so that a new plush animal would occupy pride of place at his pillowside every night. Soon I became first and foremost on that pillow; princess of the island of misfit toys.

Dante Alighieri wrote his first book in the prosimetrum genre _ La Vita Nuova _ in 14th century Florence. Since I__ compiling this collection _ my first indie publication _ in Florence, just blocks from Dante__ house, and since his book involves a lost love, and __ New Life,_ I thought it fitting to emulate this style in my own casual, intuitive fashion. My hope is that the juxtaposition of poems, journal entries, essays and prose will create a story; a memoir in anarchistic vignettes.

The Wishing BonesA thousand grandmothers ago Pyrrha and Deucalion repopulated the world with rocks, bones of mother Earth, a generation of my ancestors strained from the mud of a drowned planet.But I__ more interested in my earliest grandmothers, their gills and wetness,before they crawled from that blue expanseand learned to carry the sea within them,in their cells, between their cells, in their eyes.The buoyancy of ocean has never left us.It hides in skin__ complex reservoir where we're selectively permeable and our bodies exchange the smallest life.If we had no need to distinguish ourselves from others we__ be missing the skin that defines lovers and enemies and opens itself to both.