Sarah Katharina Kayß
Glossopteris
Irène Mathieu
purple net of rain
we have seen it dye the earth into
deep ice
and we have watched the robot
dinosaurs creak and rupture
at midnight.
we have seen without an eye.
we have seen the bubble and stink
of your animal skin
rise garish as a sun released from
a silent cave
we have seen aliens land to strew
their secrets,
viruses that slip into the strings
of things and twist, hard.
yes, we remember contact,
and the day the sky cracked
and each time the ocean vomited.
we reveled in the outstretched
fronds of existence
that you now feel only at the moment
before death.
we felt the deep gulp of extinction
and did not weep.
what is an eye?
what is a body?
it contains us but is not us.
inert and glossy, we are the
opposite of tongues in stone,
the stamp of breath
the long rain’s progeny
the green and invisible o.
Irène Mathieu is a pediatrician and writer based in Philadelphia. Her poetry, prose, and photography can be found in The Caribbean Writer, The Lindenwood Review, Muzzle Magazine, qarrtsiluni, Extract(s), Diverse Voices Quarterly, Journal of General Internal Medicine, Los Angeles Review, Callaloo Journal, HEArt Journal, and elsewhere. She has been a Pushcart Prize nominee, a Callaloo fellow, and a Fulbright scholar. Her poetry chapbook, the galaxy of origins, was published in 2014 by dancing girl press.
Sarah Katharina Kayß, *1985 in Koblenz/Germany, is an internationally published author and winner of the manuscript award of the German Writers Association (2013) for her poetry and essay collection “Ich mag die Welt, so wie sie ist” (I like the world the way it is), which was published by Allitera in Munich in 2014. She edits the bilingual literary magazine The Transnational and is currently a PhD student in the War Studies Department of King’s College London. Her poems, photographs, and essays have been published in Germany, Switzerland, Austria, the UK, Italy, New Zealand, the USA, and Canada. You can visit her photography portfolio here.