Shot in the darkness, is night my embrace?
Bed on the floorboards, is safety a space?
Pig in the pasture, this body is kin.
Sin, is it, living in loneliness? Skin,
hands on the body, is loving a gift?
Life in the shadows, is love all adrift?
Stars, is it crickets, the night serenade?
Sleep in the silence, is solace a blade?
Perhaps We Must Begin Again
Earth, sharpen your knife and call
us back so that feet vanish into fins,
bodies swiftly swim through rainfall,
far from life behind a brick wall.
Allow the dirt to beckon me with grins:
Earth, sharpen your knife and call
because mothers forgot Stonewall
and fathers suffocate babies in sheepskins.
Bodies swiftly swim through rainfall,
float their way past every golf ball
left behind by society’s kingpins.
Earth, sharpen your knife and call—
signs of peace require a long haul
down the heat of highways, like sins
bodies swiftly swim through rainfall,
washed down like food from the mess hall
where no one knows when day ends and begins.
Earth, sharpen your knife and call;
bodies swiftly swim through rainfall.
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Alicia Swain (she/her) is the author of Steel Slides and Yellow Walls (Belle Isle Books, 2025). Her poems appear in publications such as Roanoke Review, the engine(idling, and Vast Chasm. Her piece titled “Return Me to the Womb,” published in FLARE Magazine, was nominated for Best of the Net 2026.
