From "Enter Ghost"

Genya Turovskaya

Enter the bourbon and mint-laced breath

of murmuring seducers, the tender savagery of their profiles,

the ready graze and poetry

of their stealthy, tapered

fingers. Enter self-proclaimed saviors, diamond-encrusted

messianic antichrists, their sticky ill-gotten, ill-begotten gains.

Enter the transpersonal gaze

of their benevolent eyes—brackish

and softly distant—the color

of cold wet sand.

Enter ruthless arrivistes, masochistic agonists, bliss-seekers, the ever-diminishing returns of their ecstasies. Enter the carnivores

and the plant-based meat eaters with the rust of blood

on their hands. Enter the lambs,

the innocents, the sullen, gangly, achingly beautiful adolescents

pulsing the blinding searchlight of their precarious innocence.

Enter the soft-downed ducklings pecking out of their translucent shells

under the artificial suns of heat lamps in the hatcheries, imprinting

forever to their duck hunters.

Genya Turovskaya is a writer and translator from Kyiv, Ukraine, who grew up in New York City. She is the author of The Breathing Body of This Thought, the recipient of a Whiting Award, and a practicing psychotherapist.
Originally published:
November 2, 2022

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