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Avalon
  • Home
  • Spring 2025
    • Poetry
      • A Soulmate
      • All the Globe's a Stage
      • At The Water's Edge
      • Big Sisters
      • Cotton-Stuffed Heart
      • Doom, Sleep, Mastication, and My Godson Jeremiah
      • Foolish Lemons
      • I Know Icarus
      • nightstand as self-portrait
      • one thousand three hundred and eighty-eight days
      • Pasiphaë
      • Poem for a Stranger
      • Pilot of the Hollow Vessel
      • Rehoming; or, a habitat for creatures who seek darkness and cold
      • Sanctuary
      • The World Inside a Sidewalk Crack
      • Year of the Frog
      • you think it's easy opening doors in january?
      • Your Haiku
    • Fiction & Plays
      • Calculated Sympathy
      • Indigo
      • Maurice
      • The Cradle
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      • Thank you, please come again
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 Fall 2024     Poetry 

your blade is a peeler

Juliette Brookman

a rind or a crust,

a case or a skin,

peeled or cut,

chopped or bruised,

flesh leaves the tender body

and rots,

like the browning banana,

the red of an apple,

the soft tissue of a grape.

 

your complexion aches

for more scars,

more peeling back

of the outer shell

to reveal something

far too pink and fresh

to be recognized as pain.

 

you toss the slices

of apple rind

into the trash,

the bloody casing

yelling from the depths

that it has lost control

over the hidden gem,

the sweet yellow fruit

that it swore to protect.

maybe beneath your redness

is something worth

exposing.

you peel the banana,

carve the watermelon,

ignore the mushy grapes.

your scars are scabbing

and you don’t want to

pick at them

because nothing was sweet

underneath the flesh,

just metallic ooze

and porcelain bones.

you bruise just as easy

as those apples,

but the apple’s core

holds a precious nectar,

unlike your own,

which rots

deep and dark

just like the flesh

you left behind.

Air Bubbles

Americana

anatomy of a prude

Cassandra

Cortisol Rising

faucet

i don't feel myself in this world anymore

Melvin

Meteoric Parallax

Mourning

Post-Service

Temporary Love

The Blue Heron

To Laugh at Depravity

Wolfpack

You saw through the broken glass of the window pane

your blade is a peeler

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