by Claire Beeli
Make brass knuckles of your rosary chain. Wrap these cool links around your fingers, twine them like bandages. Kiss them and taste the sweet, sweaty tang. Are you ready, yet? Find darkness; no clouds can watch you there. Find the men in white robes with fat wallets and red eyes. Toughen up. Get down, get dirty. Shake loose; you’ve got this. Wait deep in an alley crevasse and stare up through the jagged lines of buildings to meet the yellow eye of the moon because she is the only one watching you now. Listen to the scrapes, grunts echoing nearby. The cracks.
Kiss the links once more. Can you taste it? The ghost of copper, coming
Claire Beeli is an emerging writer from Long Beach, California. Her work is published or forthcoming in fingers comma toes, Rill and Grove, and The Apprentice Writer, among others. She is her city’s 2023-2024 Youth Poet Laureate. Her writing has been recognized by the Scholastic Foundation, Columbia College Chicago, The New York Times Learning Network, and others.
