Like slipping jade in a red land,
like thick slow silk in a sad grey town,
austere as the pearl-eyed bracelet
of wasted ice between the city's strands;
secret, profound as the stirless lights
that stud the band of darkness, when the moon
is not there, or is there:
do you come now,
and, as they girdle the earth (stone, pearl, light, breath),
do you, as they surround the world, hold me,
winding slowly and close through my difficult topography.
Susannah Mandel's poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in
Strange
Horizons,
Sybil's Garage,
and Goblin Fruit.
Her short fiction is
forthcoming in Shimmer
and in Escape Clause
a Canadian anthology.
Her flash fiction appears regularly at
DailyCabal.com. She has lived
in San Francisco, Boston, northern France, and, most recently,
Philadelphia.