Mark of Cain

“In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion.”

— Albert Einstein

Life slips into my room at night

when I’m finally sleeping, sits

at the foot of my bed, and considers

me. She tilts her head to listen

to me—somewhere, still pleading

my case.

She is forever weighing my fate, each

moment a grain of rice in her scales.

She seemed to enjoy my labor, and so

I went to work. She seemed to enjoy

deploying my people to her severed

garden, and so I learned to tend soil.

She speaks to me in thousands of

beautiful and horrible languages,

some dead and some profane, and so

I learned the subtleties of dialect and

semantics.

She fancies her entry wounds as stars

she says, creating constellations which

tell the story of why I needed to allow her

to rearrange my vertebrae into a spiral

staircase and construct in me a fifth

chamber. And so I learned to read

the zodiac and stop bleeds. I’ve learned

to live with some scars. I’m always learning

new things for her.

She’s forever inventing

new weapons to wield against me—you

being the most recent in a long and

formidable line—but I insist on charming

her into allowing me to persist. I know,

deep down, she loves me. But

not as much as I love her,

I suspect. And so I had to learn

humility to stay—which

carries me further

than courage, and better

equips me to survive.

Even the moon

might otherwise go

unseen.

So I learn to love the moon at her darkest

instead, when she thinks no one

is paying attention. And I suppose then

that it’s okay for me to wane away a little

too, sometimes.

Always learning, you see.

Life, forever searching for me to find lessons

worth keeping, falls back for me at last.

And once again, I dream

of nothing.

- C. Lowe, 2025

Scene Six: March to the Sea

An eleven-year-old girl

crying about how a tree

grows around a fence, a whale

who sings at fifty-two

hertz: a reliquary

of adaptation, but also

absence.

Bells can only ring

because they are otherwise empty. I am

one hundred unsent letters, the black dog

haunting St. Roch’s, the Mariana Trench

of women.

Life persists in darkness,

in heaviness, in silence—like agony

and like truth—yet reproach remains

forever shaped like two hands

wrapped around my throat.

We all architect the labyrinths

which occupy us yet—the perfect wound,

an ever-hollowing of each reiteration:

some days a plea for forgiveness, others

a demand for blood.

Tell me: what god

asks for this offering?

What altar holds it

without burning?  

— C. Lowe

Julia Set

“Had I not created my whole world, I would certainly have died in other people’s.”

— Anaïs Nin

The only worlds I’ve ever learned to live in

were all given to me by people who were just

doing their best to get by. Every tongue in which

I’m fluent was taught to me by someone

who didn’t know how to speak

honestly.

Every word demands an autopsy,

every glance a question. I swallow

my silence and it tastes like gold.

In Spanish my name is a command form

of the verb, “to close, to shut.” In braille

my vertebrae read “have mercy.” I write

odes better than sonnets. The Julia set

makes me cry.

Life is a strange magic that often ends

in vanishing. Like they say, every firearm

has a safety. So we must aim

to do better. I am determined

to discover a point of entry  

which doesn’t create

new wounds.

I await healing

to once again visit me

with miracles like balloons that will

be there for me to wake up to

tomorrow. But I know enough

to know better, so I keep myself

occupied. I drive alone at night. I fold

cooling hands and wonder

what the most incredible thing

they ever did was. 

My hands—pruned

and blistered as they are—are always

making better and better mistakes

than yesterday. I withdraw,

remembering what I’ve said

about remembering.

Every intersection crosses with nostalgia.

Every apartment complex is an old number

whose door will not open for me anymore.

Every neon sign a good story,

every cemetery a reunion.

What is the opposite of a haunting?

Where does life end? When the spotted, arthritic

fingers of pestilence rob me of breath, I recall each time 

I’ve survived without something seemingly vital and figure,

“What’s one more?” 

The darkness moans my name, calling out for me

to let it wear me even thinner. You jaw thrust our union

again and again, begging with and in the only tongue we

both know to cease in its endless varieties

of obstruction. Your fingers ache

like my sternum must. But

there is no language I will not learn

to tell someone that 

I love them.   

Cierra Lowe, 2024

The Steeple

“Knowledge forbidden?
Suspicious, reasonless. Why should their Lord
Envy them that? Can it be a sin to know?
Can it be death?”

— John Milton, Paradise Lost

We all want the devil to save us

in the way he does, by taking

blame. I myself wouldn’t be

so quick to speak ill of one

who has shown so much grace

in accepting guilt, however—even

if he has half the work ethic some books claim,

I’ve shared air with people who worked

twice as hard.

So I keep my head down

when I need to. I make calendars out of

string and Venn diagrams about

wristwatches and guns.

Every weapon holds some redemptive

benefit, you see, and every salvation poses

its own equal risk. Any blade can tell you

it is less lethal than

the clock.

The knife, for example—an instrument crated

to sever—can also be used to enter. To

visualize damage and repair it. I relieve living

tissue of dead. I cauterize every bleed

I find.

The needle—something used to suture, to

mend—can also be used to puncture, to instill.

I sew foreign coins into the linings of my coats.

I mark strange words into my skin.

One day, I’m going to invent

a reconstructive operation which creates

a new organ for holding memory. One day,

each of my most honest pleas will all be

re-discovered—now feral and fully grown—

within the haunted cathedrals in which they

were born. One day, I’m going

to be harder than the shit

life keeps finding

to hit me with.

Loneliness is a strange, piercing note

which reverberates inside of the body—tonight

a velodrome of instincts gone awry—drawing

you into the darkest of places. You don’t know

how to swim, but you still listen for the ocean

in every shell you find. Salt burns

in every wound.

How many times

have I heard the words, “Please

help me,” only to respond: “You’re

going to be okay”? How many different ways

can a person say “It hurts”?

How many different ways

can I say “I know,

I’m sorry”?

Listen:

You are going

to be okay.

It hurts.

I know.

I’m sorry.

Cierra Lowe, 2024

Love Lost

Life turns her face toward me—this time, the barrel of a gun

asking me the only question that really matters—splintered into

a million wavering facets, a riddle in every language

that I don’t know how to speak:

Who are you? Why

are you here? How badly

do you want to be?

I know so many words, it seems.

Yet they all evade me when I need them most.

I’ve learned all about vanishing

from some of my favorite people. I have

opened fire into the afternoon sky, demanding

their release. I have crawled towards it,

intent to rip open the fabric of time and drag them

all home.

But the sky does not relent. So neither have I. 

I’ve been every kind of sick I know, but

it’s the getting better that counts in the end. I’ve turned

every place there is to turn—heavily against myself

some years—only to end up at each dead end. 

The drugs don’t actually kill you, most days.

They just make you forget how to live. My will

is intrinsically serrated. What I want is never

what I actually want.

So then what

is a little more confusion, a little more grief—a knot

in my neck, perhaps, or a new twinge in my wrist

maybe—when I am already a mason jar filled with

the memories of better people who did not have the luck

to survive themselves as I did? Tell me, by what kind

of artifice—what law, what awful magic, what sleight

of hand—might loss eat

from me today?

Every wound in the earth I’ve peered inside

has taught me a new name for hurt, a new place

inside me which needed to be filled. So I have dug

endlessly in this life, nailbeds stained

with the dirt I refuse to join—my fingers

some nights mostly tombstones.

At the end of the day substance was always

a cruel god, who ruled deafly and without forgiveness.

It was a lonely way to worship. Prayers

were each returned as blackbirds dissected

before me, entrails forever revealing my every

sin and shortcoming. Still today, my mouth

fills with feathers each time I must ask

for something that I need.

All pain is reproducible

I say, forever breeding

greater and greater lines

of succession. It is relief

that is often difficult

to come by.  

There are so many ways in which

the body will ask for the things we can’t—lips

turning blue to beg for breath, hearts speeding up

to spill the blood they cannot find to hold—but I

do none of these things instead. I spend most nights

awake in my most dedicated study of what is wrong

with others—and in the morning, the white lines

of the highway drag me back home. I am clean

in the way of an instrument which has been sterilized 

after many gruesome uses. I long ago buried

the person I was when I was learning to survive, but

I’ll still bring flowers to her grave on occasion. 

Every graveyard on Gravois knows my name, 

but has finally stopped waiting for me

to return their calls. 

I, too, once wrote love letters

to drunk drivers and falling pianos. The guardian angels

of gas station tap water carried me across four state lines

just to drop me off at Kingshighway and Chippewa.

I’ve been demon gossip. I’ve lost entire years  

to breaking.

And yet.

Today, I choose not to take stock of myself

by accounting for the things which are missing.

Secrets demand space inside of the body—I hide this one 

in my stomach, like something which I must digest 

endlessly. Like something I crave,

but can never taste.

Carbon steel overwhelms my palate.

Life—forever on her own terms—demands

her answers at last.

I tell her that I would flood Basin Street in brass

for a soul like this one—gifting back the heart

which I’ve been holding onto for a friend—shaking

and shimmying my way through the French Quarter,  

busking the electric violin for one last

kiss.

I tell her that I do not know the word for this bloody crusade 

in which I eternally war to stay where I am, but

that it will always be one of the things

I know best. 

I tell her that she’ll never catch me

with clean hands.

Appeased, she grants me

another day.

• Cierra Lowe, 2023

Kerosene

I want to do to you

what the dawn does to the sky,

and for all the same reasons.

I want to wash through you and chase away

the dark. I want to light you up and paint you

every kind of pink.

I want to warm you.

I want to put a contract down

on your smile. I want to learn the topography

of your rib cage, the soundtrack behind your

scar tissue, the cheat code to your good days.

I want to mass produce good days for you.

I pack all of this into every “thank you”—stuffing

this poem into two words like every good outfit I own

into a battered suitcase and I have no idea

where I’m going.

Wherever you want to go.

• Cierra Lowe, 2023

Hungry Work

If forgiveness were the one thing standing between

my spear and my supper, I might perhaps

one day regret being unable

to endure hunger.

I do not hunt to kill—and yet, here I live

and eat. My conscious, as always, is quiet

as this mausoleum. I sleep like the dead.

I return home from every war

with my shield instead of on it. I am disinclined

to sacrifice where I might instead conquer.

The horse I ride in on is black as pitch.

I try my hands at benevolence again

and again, pruned and blistered

as they are.

My lover is no Diego Rivera. My hair has grown

long enough to cover my breasts, though

I don’t. His deciduous heart

blankets the earth in a predictable

yet honest fashion. I teach him pointedly

about conifers, yet assure him that I

(usually) do not mind

the raking.  

My books reveal naught about love’s

half-life, but I suppose as long

as I can chloroform myself with

his t-shirts, he gets to choose between

an entry wound and a mouth to feed.  

I myself remain unaffected by the change

of seasons, so his mutinies intrigue me.

I observe. I fashion jewelry out of sun-bleached

bones. I eat whatever berries I come across,

tempting fate and her sisters. I steal

and burn priceless paintings.

I lick my fingers

clean.

 - Cierra Lowe-Price, 2023

Father, Figured - Pt. I

I gain consciousness as a sentient human being

in a shitty motel room somewhere in the greater St. Louis area.

The music video for The Macarena is playing

on the small television in the double bed room, which

places this memory somewhere in the early to mid 90’s.

I am four or five, and my sister is here with me.

The door is open, and the sunlight and summer

warmth waft inside to greet me, bringing with it

the familiar scent of my dad’s Marlboro Reds.

My most prized possession while I am living in my

father’s world—which differs staggeringly from that

of my mother’s—is a peeling red photo album, the kind

they used to make with the adhesive pages covered

in a clear film. I spend my hours making drawings and

carefully fastening them within. My dad once bought me

a pack of Big League Chew bubble gum, whose package

graces my collection as well. I like to remember the things

he buys me.

In the wintertime he wears an old brown leather

jacket, and the inside is a map. I like to pretend that he’s been

to all of the places inside and is some kind of magical worldly

traveler, which would explain why sometimes I don’t see him

for awhile. He lets me do things my mother never does, like

get Slurpees when he takes me to 7 Eleven late at night.

He always runs into his friends there. Once, I was woken up

by a man knocking on his apartment door. He was wearing

a white suit, which I thought was very fancy. He crouched down

to introduce himself and ask me my name. He told me

he had a daughter my age named Fox. I did not like his cologne,

and I thought Fox was a weird name for a kid.

I am six. It is early in the morning, and the world is covered in

snow. My father is driving me to school, but his car breaks down.

It has a hole in the bottom and I can see the road speeding beneath

my feet when we drive. We walk the last mile or so, my blue

Winnie The Pooh backpack slung casually over his shoulder

as I do my best to walk within his footprints so my socks won’t get

too wet.

I am seven. I make my dad a beaded bracelet, which I’m really good at.

It is rainbow, of course, because he deserves the coolest.

We wears it all the time and never takes it off. One day, I notice

he isn’t wearing it, and it is instead looped around his gear shift.

Bereaved, I ask him why he took it off. He tells me he’s sick of

guys at work asking him out. I don’t understand what he means.

I am eight. My sister is living in an apartment with our dad

on Enright. My mom hates us staying there, but I don’t mind

that all his furniture is made of red milk crates and plywood.

He sleeps in a hammock, I sleep in a papasan. One afternoon,

he lets me rip up and throw away all his cigarettes.

But he buys more the next day.

I am nine. My father picks me up from school. He has a long nail

sticking out of his foot from an accident at work.

There is blood all over his floor mat, and I beg him

to go to the hospital. Instead he drives us to Great Grandpa’s

where he is living now. Great Grandpa loves Walker Texas Ranger

and God. He paints pictures of trains all the time, because he used to be a bad guy

who robbed banks and stuff, but then he had a dream where God spoke to him

and told him to get onto the train before it was too late.

He did, and woke up a changed man. When we get inside, Great Grandpa

speaks in tongues over my dad’s foot as he yanks the nail out with

a bloody rag and rips his soggy work boot off. I do not understand

why he didn’t just go to the doctor.

I am ten. We all got out of school this morning because two planes

crashed into two buildings in New York. All of the adults are crying.

My dad picks me up. I ask him why this happened, and he tells me

that there are some really ate up people in the world. He lights incense

in his apartment and spends a lot of time in the bathroom. I just want

to watch Pokemon like I always do, but the only thing on TV is videos

of planes crashing and crashing and crashing into buildings.

I do not understand why my dad spends so much time in the bathroom.

I am eleven. My dad is living at my Nana’s house, which I really like, because

it's very nice and clean and she cooks really good food. I’m staying here all weekend.

My dad has third degree burns all down his legs. I ask him what happened,

and he said he spilled boiling water while he was cooking. I carefully remove

his bandages, apply the ointment, and redress them twice a day like the doctor

told him to. I don’t understand how he got burned so bad because he doesn’t cook.

• Cierra Lowe-Price 2023

Lilim

When I was fourteen, a strange boy

came up to me at a dance. He searched

his pockets for something intangible, and then

solemnly informed me that he thought I seemed

to glow. The trap door of my heart

swung wide open, and generations of doom

roared to life.

At fifteen, I would catch grown men

looking at me. I would look away

and they would look longer.

I was sixteen the first time I was unceremoniously

pinned against a bathroom wall by a stranger

at a party. I could not comprehend

the thinness of the air around me which

stole my protests, or the heat which rose

from my skin and cauterized my hesitancy.

All I could hear was the singular base note

throbbing from somewhere deep within my

limbic system, chanting:

“For you, for you, for you.”  

That night marked the beginning

of my own Cold War, of lessons in starvation

from which I could only be granted brief

respite. Of need like a wound from which

I could never heal, nor perish.

I woke to discover a bear trap

in place of my body. I became a shiny thing

in a murder of crows—a nesting doll,

forever undressing. If I had to execute every

part of myself which has defected to a

halting grasp, I’d be spread across

a hundred shallow graves.

Hunger is a most painful sensation, a clawing

need which demands to be met. You must understand

how it feels to be haunted by vacancy in the place

you call a home.

Love is a violent handler, sure, which is why

our hearts are the same size as our fists.

Desire, however, is murderous—barbing us

with teeth and nails like concertina wire

with which to snag you up and draw

a bit of blood.

Yet, the trace of fingertips across

the backs of my knees is holier

than any garden I’ll ever set foot in.

I’ll die happy, a thing of dirt and broken

ribs, knowing why Eden never felt

like home.

• Cierra Lowe-Price, 2023

z/k KTR

 I never grew to be as tall

as my first handlers had hoped. Still,

for what I lacked in size and strength,

I more than made up for in resilience.

A mildewed rag absorbs both blood and screams  

as my shoulder is shoved back into place. This place

is so unlike the desert which I once called

home—never dry, nor warm nor bright.

I practice writing my old name in the strange condensation

which eternally clings to these concrete walls. At all hours,

men are screaming.

I myself am no longer a person, but a battleship. A gun.

Violence is the only thing that sticks to my ribs.

I keep the pale rider busy as ever since they broke

my fingers into tombstones. I collect the teeth

of my conquests. I do not blink.

Freedom, like other drugs, is so good

it has a certain taste. I can’t remember it now,

but I bet it has an effervescent quality,

like those fancy flavored waters. Imprisonment

tastes metallic. Like blood. Like rusting wire

holding your jaw together.

If I ever get off of this forsaken island, I will

wash myself in gasoline. I will flay this place

from my flesh. I will find a kind, soft woman

for my own. I’ll hold her every night.

I’ll never utter a Cyrillic syllable

ever again. I will forget.  

• Cierra Lowe-Price, 2023

All Things Eva

In the dream, I wept as your family packed

personal effects into open boxes. Everywhere I looked

I saw lingering evidence of our existence there. Photos and

paintings, some of which I watched you make as I smoked

naked in the beds. The plants were all dying.

I feel your annoyance, even now. The house

was never mine. But it felt like you, which

made it home. An endless variety of surfaces, and one

hundred secret rooms. Carpeted closets and freestanding

bathtubs. Furniture aged and worn, intricate scrolling,

inappropriate metals. A house somehow, in a way,

like you. Strangely charmed.

The old mansion and all of the grandiosity

it both promised and also sometimes delivered

is no longer in your bloodline. I wonder who is.

Fractals and nudibranch and warm water.

An eyelash for every time I wished to have you

back. She was a curator of all things. Her hair

is everywhere I’ve ever slept. A woman like a four-poster bed,

a handful of sequins, acrylic paint, and fish bones.

My feet remember how to step around a bedroom like a minefield.

My hands still smell like butane and graphite.

A vagrant of the universe, fortune’s darling—she

was a genre all her own. Old paperback novels and floral

fabrics, dismantled furniture and unbound drawings. Beauty,

but also, disarray. Her world was my peace.

Moons and moons and moons

have waxed and waned above us. Oh Eva,

who knows how many different types of

popcorn plaster have kept watch over you

while you slept.

But tonight, on a rooftop in Silver Lake,

clad in only string lights and prayer flags,

the pleasure is mine.

• Cierra Lowe-Price, 2022

Baby Teeth

When mother told me I was born with a body instead of a bear trap

I think what she was saying was that I rather lacked the teeth

and the temperature that I stood to inherit from her

I imagine it must have been rather a disappointment to discover

something which was begotten at such a devastating cost

might dare reveal to be so very unlike herself

But I found my sharper edges in time.

This made her happy, I think.

When at seventeen they found me half gone

in that bathtub, I think she fancied me a person

like a snow globe, who only became more appealing   

the more life shook me up.

We have a chicken, a fox, and a sack of grain.

Nowhere we go is safe.

What I mean is that someone once taught me

to either kill it or leave it, and it is a wonder how far your feet

can carry you away from the things your hands

can no longer bear to hold.

What I’m trying to say is that loss is a plant life

which springs eternal in innumerable forms, rising to greet me

from every crack in the sidewalk.

When I’m finished gnawing these vines off of my ankles,

I’m going to circle your block in a long coat.

I’m going to climb the highest hill I can find.

And I’m going to hang the moon, just for you.

And it will all be worth it

to finally hear the wolf cry girl.

Come morning, they will be able to see him pacing

head bowed in the overgrown garden of an abandoned

school, distressed and wondering in what form

I might wane his way tonight.

• Cierra Lowe-Price, 2022

A Letter to Mata Hari, Dead at 41

I can envision your pilot, 

roiling within his apartment that 

mourning—despicably 

frying eggs and renouncing 

your conception. As if 

your essence was merely insult 

to his injury.

I bet you were born on Rosh Hashanah. 

I bet you used a rib as a hatpin. 

I bet that those twelve barrels seemed a curious affection 

as they peered upon you—they say you

blew a kiss to the

firing squad. They say you wore

white gloves. They say you kept

your face to the sky.

You were then deafened by God’s silence. 

It was French bullets that made love to 

your body for the last time. 

Blood wept from your abdomen, 

and still-blind gathered around its 

mother. Undancing legs 

curled beneath you like an impossible 

chair as you birthed your first

Rorschach test. To France, 

it looked like moral ambiguity.

To General Nicolai, it looked like 

a breech of contract.

To your creator, it looked like 

spilled ink.

• Cierra Lowe-Price, 2022

The Revival of Brother Love

The staples nestled into your scalp

guide my fingers like abandoned railroad tracks

to the place from whence your thoughts depart.

What dark cargo freight you now, little engine?

Upon which boxcars have your stained and swollen

knuckles rapped, and which granted you entry?

To where do you stowaway tonight?

Your body and your thoughts weigh heavily

against my breast—your truths are iron ore,

and my hands too gentle for mining. So I hold you

in the cradle of my hips instead. I would never hurt you

like they do, but it is my doing nonetheless.  

The first time we came together, Leviticus 19 fell quiet

from your lips as you slowly revealed my miles of

painted skin—still, you worshiped at the altar of me.

I do not understand the place from which you come,

Brother Love, but I understand the needs of the flesh.

And while needles have been used to pull different things

through us, in the end, they’re all sutures.

This is my way of stitching you back together,

the only prayer for healing I ever learned.

Tell me lover, where lives your God?  

In a windowless basement apartment like this one,

I fear. Do you praise Him on your knees

like you do me, or are the hymns I inspire in you

unfit for consecrated soil? When you leave here,

do you pray for forgiveness, for me? Or am I

beyond the graces of your Savior?

Hunger draws you to my door night after night,

but the dawn baptizes your retreat in self-reproach.

The bed we share—sheets twisted and now cold—yawns before me

like an early grave, and a one-way passenger rail to the place

you fear the most. I search the face in the mirror for evidence of

unholiness, of the devil’s work you suspect is at hand,

but see only a woman.  

• Cierra Lowe-Price, 2022

Kid Gloves

Whoever you thought I was, I wasn’t her.

I was not the Madonna, nor her adversary. I was not the moon,

nor the red-taloned demonness taking pot shots at your heart

only to call her friends later and laugh about how quickly you

bled out. Why you were looking for her in the first place, I

cannot be sure. But maybe we did our hair alike. Or both

had similar curves. And yet, while you waited for me to

draw on you, I never did. Eventually you fell asleep

on my couch, confused at my lack of malice, and happy

to be the little spoon. I asked the back of your head why

you came in search of your executioner. Your soft snores

were my only reply, but I was glad

she never had the chance

to finish you off.

• Cierra Lowe-Price, 2022

Violent Ends

“These violent delights have violent ends, And in their triumph die like fire and powder, Which as they kiss consume. The sweetest honey Is loathsome in his own deliciousness, And in the taste confounds the appetite.”

— Romeo and Juliet, William Shakespeare

His smile was a wound, teeth glistening

like broken bone protruding from a garish laceration

of flesh. I winced at the strangeness of the sight,

the straight line of his lips which I tightrope walked

slashed apart—laughing at a joke that I didn’t

understand.   

When our thighs would accidentally touch

I’d burst open like the fourth of July, shamefully

lighting up the room for everyone to see. He

most likely murmured something about noise

ordinances and debris as I willed my lungs

to re-expand, fighting against the soot and ash of

my own burning need.  

A seventeen in one hand, and nines

in the other—I fell for a man like a weapon that I wished to 

turn on myself. I studied his mechanisms, the way

in which he might be dissembled, where

his safety may be hidden. I yearned to dwell

within his chambers.

When one day he passed the heavy metal

backwards to me from the passenger seat,

it was the first time I ever truly felt the heady

bestowal of trust. If he’d have told me to aim

for my knees rather than the guard rail,

I would have obeyed.

Every night I sent out search parties

for his love, only to awake among wet leaves

and exhausted hounds. No ballistics expert could identify

the ammunition with which he riddled me. The broken magnet

that it was, I extracted the faulty organ which cowered

between my blackened lungs—I pierced her with a long needle,

and trained her as a compass instead. 

Even now, years later, fireworks and gunfire still

sound the same—no matter how far south

I roam.

• Cierra Lowe-Price, 2022

Howl At The Moon

Today I met a girl with yellow eyes. No shit, her irises

were golden like scotch and sunbeams mixed together.

I wondered what her tears tasted like, if they would

burn. I, always the poet, greeted her: “You look like

a fuckin wolf.” She grinned, revealing blunt canines,

and confessed she hated them when she was younger.

How typical, I thought. For us to instinctively be ashamed

of the things that make us shine. I hope for you, reader,

to never dim that which makes others linger curiously

on you. All the better to see you with.   

• Cierra Lowe-Price, 2022

Junkie

Scenes which remind me of your absence

pull at the seams of me. Carefully stitched patches

of healing fray. I am a sea of wetness—blood, tears,

spinal fluid—that you once swam. For you,

my flesh tore. My levees broke.

But this is not a love poem

any more than Katrina was a shower.

The first time skin became a panic room

that I could not coax a man out of,

I breathed for him. I cracked his ribs

trying to remind his heart its lines.

The door they opened into his throat

led to nowhere.

I am the child of three first responders. My blood

smells like a campfire, I was raised by people

haunted by their own ghost stories. One of them

ignores them, one of them plays house with them,

and the other one joined them. He walked right though

that door to nowhere, with cracked ribs and a

stage-frightened ticker.

His absence was a laceration

whose edges could not be approximated.     

My last name is a scar.

They say when you put two violins in a room

together, that if you play the one, then the other

will sing back to it. But I am something more like

a cello: admittedly less delicate, and more burdensome.

Still, in spite of being tone deaf, I sang back to my father

in the best way that I could. When I first picked up,

it was because I wanted to know what it was

that he loved more than me.

When I finally put it back down, it was because

I’d finally learned that love had nothing

to do with it after all. Sometimes irony

isn’t all that funny.

I won the war they say, but I never came home

from it. It has been eight long years

of being a refugee in my hometown.

The person I used to be

is the old country.

Every gas fire is gunshots.

Every cookout is a hot metal firework,

a Roman candle aimed right at my spine—they say

that smell is the most powerful link we have

to memory. I don’t know shit about science, but I know

that sometimes cooking dinner tastes like Dormin.

I cook dinner anyway. I know that the way blood blooms

in a solution makes me understand sharks better.

I bloom anyway.    

My blood, as it were, is a smoky siren

that I could only ignore for so long. My first language

is the sustainment of life. Sometimes something’s

gotta break to keep the show

going.    

My second language is the firing of synapses,

my neurons reaching for one another

to weave together one cohesive tapestry

of everything I’ve seen: a world

like a beautiful mosaic,

even the pieces that

are broken.

- Cierra Lowe, 2021

Live Wire

Life holds my head with two hands, talons spread wide with

prey in clutch, aiming my face towards everything that is bleeding

and burning, and demands: “What do you see? What do you see?”

I gag and choke and mutter:

“Anything I want.”

This is what my arrogance looks like.

My arrogance does not walk me into a room and tell me I

am the prettiest girl there, it has never hesitated to share a seat

or a cigarette with a stranger, it does not look down.

My arrogance does not tell me I am better than anyone else.

It tells me that I am better than myself.

My arrogance thumbs through clips of me retching 

in unfamiliar places, of begging for rides and money

and a place to crash, and chuckles: “How young we were.”

She looks at a mistake we have made and tells me it is impossible

to do so again as she walks me up an unbraced ladder. She thinks

that my scars are like my stretch marks in that something in me simply 

needed more room to grow—and yet, nothing was ever born

of the things she put in me.

Back when I decided it was time to take a break

from God, what I really wanted to see was if God believed in me

too. Both times I tried to return myself to sender He lost

my letters, and then when the angels of barely getting by carried me

all the way home from Georgia, all my arrogance said was:

“Love me more.”

That’s all she ever says.

I have written more eulogies than sonnets.

My Punnet square is chain-linked, my father is in ashes.

I know the difference between a garden and a graveyard better than most,

and yet my arrogance tells me that silence is golden when I suspect

it is only brass. Of all the violence I’ve witnessed in this life,

my arrogance is the most profound.  

Today my ribcage delineates a preservation area of forgiveness.

But my arrogance forgets why forgiveness was needed in the first place.

— Cierra Lowe-Price, 2021

Hunt & Gather

As I take in quiet breaths, my body shifts these leaves

Still I move in silent grace for I was born of thieves

Yes, this here flesh is more than just a cage for sin and need

Still my instincts stay steely sharp because every animal bleeds

I make good fire that brings good heat, but heat curves all the lines

And even so, hunger has a way of consuming all else on our minds 

So then as one hand grasps a crest, two fingers will trace the bow

And the thrum of a new bass will beat against my bones

I keep watch of shifting muscle beneath distant pelted skin:

No, I do not hunt to kill—and yet I still must eat to live

- Cierra Lowe-Price, 2021