Inna Effress

Low Like Fog

PUBLISHED IN FOLIO 2023: VOL. 38.

We kept our eyes closed when we lathered our cunts
With the harsh soap fashioned from human fat.
From the human condition, boiled brown–

To a square. What’s the sense in asking questions?
More and more of them will spring like contagion
In war. How lovers, in blind haste, will storm bright fields

Of poppies blanketing mines. Coats of powder,
Left over from those other times. Laughs we shall not speak of now.
Streets they have renamed. We had to mask the soap’s scent

With kaolin. With almond oil. With words whose meanings
Had been engineered for the task at hand:
The menial job of filling frozen tracks with snowfall,

Of silencing the bells. Of scouring all the schoolhouse chalk
Until the black slates no longer squealed. They wore wide smiles
When they stripped us like old battery wires.

They pried us from our machinery until our fathers’ acid
Spat hot down our thighs. Those stains lasted one lifetime,
Then vanished with us, and all that’s left—

Our perfumed remains. Only one piece of us escaped their eye:
Our spite. It slipped, how souls do, out of us.
It hangs low, like fog.