Edited by Alloe Mak

“Twenty years

of subtle self-indulgence,

self-denial;

until the subject

thinks herself a queen

& yet a beggar –

both at the same time.

She must doubt herself

in everything but love.

She must choose passionately

& badly.

She must feel lost as a dog

without her master.

She must refer all moral questions

to her mirror.

She must fall in love with a cossack

or a poet.

She must never go out of the house

unless veiled in paint.”

-Excerpt from Alcestis On The Poetry Circuit by Erica Jong

The veiled widow in all black, shielding herself from pity, yet burning under the sun. She’d do better in moonlight at the gravestone of her lost lover. Better pressed flat to the earth by the wind that once took his words of moving across the world. Crying into the cool moss as soft as overturned bedsheets, the morning after she accidentally said I love you. When the covers were hot and bubbling with reunion and passion, and she didn’t know anything about him. When he kissed her familiarly and became overtaken by a craving prophesied at birth. He stroked her and licked his fingers, and she sighed into the black. She didn’t wear it to hide something ugly or alien. She was not embarrassed by what was blurred by lace. She wore it to hide what he was not prepared to see. The blinding fractals of devotion and affection. So bright their beams could slice through the skin of aloof lovers who wrongfully believed they had deciphered her patterns. 

Cheetah and zebra prints wrap around her face. The black spots and stripes blend into her pupils, concealing the placement of her eyes. You may only find where they sit by searching for where the fabric flutters from her beating eyelashes. She has seen enough of him to know she’d rather not. Been exposed enough to rather hide behind pleats and cinches that gather and expel desire faster than she’d be able to if she were naked. 

She might just become a smoker. She’ll buy tobacco, filters, papers, and practice rolling at the kitchen table. When he comes to town, they’ll stand on balconies or sit face to face on fire escapes. He’ll hand her a spliff, making her lungs as cloudy as her heart. After they’re done in bed, exposed to every eye in the room, and he asks to smoke, she’ll laugh off the fact he only wanted her to finish so he wouldn’t feel guilty, because that’s just who he is. And maybe this is just who she is. They’ll sit in the pitch-black park, radiating rhythmic shivers, Bar Italia in the air, while he talks about moving to the other side of the world. She will get quiet, her mind jumping months ahead. But he won’t notice, because the veil must look like a two-way mirror; it always surprised her when he asked about her. When she didn’t have to say, In case you’re wondering, I’m also good. She will do her best to be everything he could want, perhaps everything too far away for him. They’ll spell words in biscuits across his pants and listen to music in his sister’s bedroom. They will intertwine along the spree and make out in the smoking room. Her laughs come from affection and his come from smoke. 

When she’s naked, he stares in the mirror and tells her how good she looks. When she’s clothed, he asks how she is. When she’s gone, he forgets she exists. They met in the winter when she wore a hat of bear fur and woven gloves. He wore a leather jacket and dark curly hair. And zebra shoes. They made him gallop. She lay in bed showing him pictures of horses, and he rolled a spliff on her stomach. They said goodbye in summer, when the air dissolved their layers and their emotions turned to mist. On her birthday, she smoked three cigarettes. The first singed a hole through the veil, a bullet hole on an animal fallen in a dry savanna. The second made her eyes water; she ashed onto her pants, embers falling into the folds. The third filled her with anger that stuck like crystallized honey in her throat. The next morning, unseasonably warm, she spat the sugared words of hurt into his hand—for he’d held only one out for her. A superimposition of old love on careless skin. 

She was extremely stupid, clinically so; it’s a miracle she managed to preserve any bit of herself.

“You are extremely stupid.” He looked at where the veil fluttered a little extra.

“I like you.” She looked at where she liked to kiss him best.

He only laughed. She pulled down the veil, patterns whipping off her cheeks, her features finally materializing just for him. He laughed harder. 

Then he threw the latest edition of the DSM at her and said whatever she had must not yet be published because he’d never seen anyone so deluded. The book caught the veil, which was wrapped around her neck, its final resting place, and it ripped right through the zebra print. A whalebone dagger serrated with his satisfied smile. She placed the veil back over her face, now with a hole the size of her open mouth. He would’ve just thought it useful for smoking. But he didn’t see the aftermath; he was ten feet away, lighting a cigarette. She smelled Pueblo Blue and wished the veil could sew itself whole again, so she didn’t have to taste his kisses on the air. 

She had misgivings about time—the way it swept its cloak, collecting the dust of innocent girls pulled from the hardwood. How it swayed down the universe’s hall, wallpapered with the flayed skins of those stupid girls who fell in love with impetuous boys. 

It would be easier for her to die than to stop thinking about him. Not just her mind or her heart, but a flesh memory. Unforgettable skin, branded by his touch. They ride the tram, they laugh on the cobblestone. They glow in the dark, his immortal body pressed tight against hers under covers. 

Her bed had never felt so empty before she met him, and still, he could not be in it. She began to resent her bed, pointlessly expansive. The right side, slept in and ruffled, the left side, cool and tidied, the pillow covering a well-loved photograph. Sometimes, if she rested her cheek on the top of the green pillowcase, silky as moss, she felt a warmth pulsing steadily, quietly up from the image. Seismic waves from under soft rocks. When she warmed her face too much to be imagined, she’d free the photo from the fire it had created. But like the sheets on the left side, the photo stayed crisp, cold as a morning stone still waking in the shade. There he was—towering, frozen like a keep within the curtain walls of the Earth, yet wrapped in her fingers. He stood alone, every color affixing to his skin. Two hands, soft as custard in cheesecloth. Hair curling like waves about to break. A face crafted from all the beauty in the cosmos. Eyes phosphorescing a long-gone sun. There was no reason to look away. She had never known a body or soul more beautiful than his. Without interruption, she was certain to beat along to his pulse across the universe. He was a binary star, and she was intoxicated with the prospect of orbiting infinity with him. She pressed the photograph to her chest, straining her skin to pull any more warmth from it. Bare lips and blue hair still waiting to be touched. The silence swirled, thin and grey. His voice was always thick pink and gold. His words always ran like his feet. The veil she once wore around him sat frayed and faded on a hook behind the door. She laid his photograph on the pillow and pulled the grassy sheets over her head, trying to look the way he would’ve remembered. The tops of her eyelids met the darkness, and she flowed to the in-between. Maybe the bed would be filled in the morning.