Julia Anna Morrison
TREATMENT
The night you get here, the Earth seems strange,
unmarried, out looking for a mate.
On the fifth floor of the mansion, my eyes close so
the moonflower opens in the peach-colored night.
An anesthesiologist tricks me to sleep. Below us,
rain paints the doors shut-white. I notice
my hands have begun to wrinkle. I hope the Earth finds a match
before it gets too old, run over by storms.
My night person carries our baby in his arms. Suddenly,
I am very bored but I am crying. The desire to kiss takes me over.
Someone’s unbuckled my arms.
I wait for treatment but the doctors are so busy with their cloths, their staples.
I don’t want to be consoled with a coat. I am a garden at the dead of winter.
JULIA ANNA MORRISON recently had work appear in Ploughshares. She lives in Iowa City and co-edits Two Peach.
ISSUE FOUR features fiction by David Crouse, Susan Daitch, JoAnna Novak, and Ian Stansel; literary criticism by Rick Moody; film writing by J.M. Tyree; creative nonfiction by Michael Levan and Marco Wilkinson; film writing by J.M. Tyree; a David Remnick interview with John Ashbery; poetry by Natalie Eilbert, Kathy Fagan, Sarah Gridley, Philip Metres, Danielle Pafunda, Daniel Poppick, Zachary Schomburg, Sandra Simonds, Analicia Sotelo, and Catherine Wagner; and translations of Jorge Luis Borges and Ye Hui.