Where the woods meet the town there’s | Amee Nassrene Broumand

an eclipse in the trees, a bubble below, a blister in the air, a songbird

facedown in the mushrooms. Aftershift worldout. We come here

when we crave the underhum.

Nightborn fog curls through the wreckage of nests built from thorns

and thistledown. Mothernoise. Moonset births a universe of tattered moths

ghostflapping around a flaming cattail in supernova, worshiping mom

as she warps reality. Deadtoes emerge from pineroots to hunt the sun

with their bonnets and bone nets and sunbaskets, unaware their mythsought

spookfire crackles underearth now. Night splinters the eggshell of our world

into infinite corridors. A glowing elevator rises from the rainditch by the roadside

and opens its doors. Ding.

I remember

chasing you through the sunfields,

the darkmoons of your eyes, the catch

of my throat. Breath’s end.

Dawn. Our very own elder goddess roars on the horizon, mistagged

as tame and generally unseen. Houses and alleyways and townsfolk

all sink into the doorshadow. Worldrattle. Idling, the old garbagetruck

mumbles to no one, waiting

for morning to begin.

Amee Nassrene Broumand (she/they) is a queer Iranian American poet from the Pacific Northwest. Nominated twice for Best of the Net and thrice for the Pushcart Prize, her work appears in the anthology Essential Voices: Poetry of Iran and Its Diaspora (Ed. Christopher Nelson, Green Linden Press, 2021) as well as in numerous journals, including 3:AM Magazine, Carousel, Glass: A Journal of Poetry (Poets Resist), Rust + Moth, and Sundog Lit. Find them on Twitter at @AmeeBroumand.