about the time we stole pears in Surprise, Arizona and let cornfields undress us in Assumption, Illinois There were terra cotta armies in our hearts We listened to the shell’s mouth And tell me how the day poured its honey over everything, and after, the memory of everything How we wore our skin like a question There was lidocaine, yes, and apples from the cemetery And tell me how our tea danced to the tides of the moon How I got sick That I got better Leave out the part about the air being toxic, how it opened us like figs Tell me instead about my eyes under the ponderosa tree What was it you called them? Red wine on a shard of glass
147 The Paris-American
Originally from Kishinev,
Moldova, Ruth Madievsky lives and writes in Los Angeles. She studied creative
writing and biology at the University of Southern California, where she
received the Edward W. Moses Creative Writing Prize for fiction and the Phi
Kappa Phi Student Recognition Award for her poetry chapbook-in-progress. Her
work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in RHINO
Poetry,The MacGuffin,The
Doctor T.J. Eckleburg Review, andAtticus
Review. She is a graduate student at USC's School of
Pharmacy.