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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
      • The Hollow Room
    • Visual Art
      • A Farmer in Vinales Cuba
      • A Tobacco Farmer in Viñales, Cuba
      • Thank you, please come again
      • Self Reflective Self Portrait 5
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        • 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
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        • The World Inside a Sidewalk Crack
        • Year of the Frog
        • you think it's easy opening doors in january?
        • Your Haiku
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        • Calculated Sympathy
        • Indigo
        • Maurice
        • The Cradle
        • The Hollow Room
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        • A Tobacco Farmer in Viñales, Cuba
        • Thank you, please come again
        • Self Reflective Self Portrait 5
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        • Poetry
        • Fiction & Plays
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 Spring 2025     Poetry 

nightstand as self-portrait

Natalie Gales

Honorable Mention - 2025 S. Gordden Link Poetry Award

nightstand as self-portrait

in the lower left corner:

the neighbors’ intro to beekeeping guide

(practically unopened, teeming with magenta sticky notes in someone else’s handwriting)

rests on top of two separate children’s bibles

(one illustrating lazarus’ return, one with pages translucent and unseen as holy ghosts)

rests on top of an asl book from the nineties

(whose introduction boasts of the latest, most innovative vocabulary, like “skateboard” and “fax machine”)

 

directly behind the perched books:

a baby blue lamp

(its shade precariously perched on top, its dial all too difficult to twist off in the night)

resides beside a box of tissues

(often forgotten, often empty, always out of reach when sick in bed)

 

to the right of the lamp:

a pull-string bag

         (faux red velvet peeking through a layer of dust)

contains the rosary received after confirmation mass

(with pearls as real as the velvet, chains that threaten to snag clothing and fingernails, just the right length for a necklace when mothers aren’t looking and goth club waltzes wail)

 

to the side of the rosary:

a slick black glasses case

(received three months ago, already slightly broken)

holds golden, circular frames

(not broken, but cursed with perpetually smudged lenses)

sits next to the most beloved book in the room

(water damaged in the corner, spine peeling away from the pages, the results of being carried on a rainy day)

rests beside a yellow sheet of printer paper

(received in high school, titled “mental health resources,” containing the numbers of several crisis hotlines— you know, just in case the bibles and the rosary don’t work out)

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

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