[Chorus]

And she lights another cigarette

Tell me about the dream

the one where Aphrodite comes

out of the sea intact

until she remembers

she is actually a bird-

dance and every time

she opens her mouth

another apple

Tell me that this place will ruin us

That all these words are just another song

on a fisherman’s radio-her face bright

red in this light-she opens her

mouth-it’s more like a song

and the days-This thing between us-have we ever

not been inconsolable?

Ann is the author of The Medea Notebooks (spring, 2023 Etruscan Press), and The Italian Professor’s Wife (Press 53), as well as the chapbooks The Bird Happened, perhaps there is a sky we don’t know: a re-imagining of sappho, Everywhere You Put Your Mouth, Sea [break], and DREAM/WORK. Ann’s work has recently appeared in The American Journal of Poetry, Chicago Quarterly Review, The Louisville Review, Gigantic Sequins, New York Quarterly, Narrative Magazine, Bayou Magazine, and Conduit.