swifts  &  s l o w s · a quarterly of crisscrossings

every single crack a crevice
Christina M. Rau

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Nothing Left / Behind

  There is a love [that] doesn’t need an object. – “16 Sloppy Haiku,” Paul
Blackburn

Having left that place
we have nothing left behind.
A summer-swollen heart
burst into bangles
between 12th and Jane.

Impulse uncontrollable
under influence of contraband—
hopeless is a verb
unconjugatable.

Sage smudged. Elephant blessed.
Dust swept with pan and brush,
the breeze does the rest
when windows are open—
particles still drift in shafts of light
everywhere; it’s what we breathe.

Crosswalk hashed out tarred over.
Every single crack a crevice
catching something we lost.

Shoot The Moon

The soft shoulder ends
a hard target off center
throes of suffocation
A quiver on a back
poison point.
One eye closed
throat steels against
a final swallow.

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Christina M. Rau is the author of the 2021 poetry collection What We Do To Make Us Whole (Alien Buddha Press), the Elgin Award winning sci-fi fem poetry collection Liberating The Astronauts (Aqueduct Press) and the chapbooks WakeBreatheMove (Finishing Line Press) and For The Girls, I (dancing girl press). She is currently serving as Poet In Residence for Cedaremere, Poet In Residence for Oceanside Library and was named Long Island Poet of the Year 2020 by Walt Whitman Birthplace Association. She is also the founder of Poets In Nassau, a reading circuit on Long Island, NY. She teaches English at Nassau Community College where she also serves as  Editor for The Nassau Review. Her poetry has appeared on gallery walls in The Ekphrastic Poster Show, on car magnets for The Living Poetry Project. Christina M. Rau’s Website →