This is how magic works, right?
Hayley Bowen
The closer you are the less you see— like how you can’t see the fat
purple scars on the milk flesh of my thighs when your face is buried
in my hollowed hips, or how when the tip of your nose is blurring against mine,
I can’t see the gap of your teeth or the silver sneaking its way
into your beard. And that must be to say that it is all an illusion,
that we’re here, suspended happily, in our own disbelief,
that I’m a conman selling you a sick girl bottled in the body of something sweet,
and that I’m buying your fairytale—all these middle chapters, no finale—never looking
for a curtain to pull back, not interested in being proven wrong. If I keep you this
close to my face, eyes crossed and blurry with unfading starlight, it’s magic all
the same, right?
About the Author
Hayley Bowen (she/her) is currently an MFA candidate at Syracuse University where she is Poetry Editor at Salt Hill Journal. Her work has appeared in Alien, Kissing Dynamite Poetry, Santa Clara Review, and elsewhere. Hayley is an avid craft beer enthusiast, a terrible knitter, and lives in upstate New York with her pet moss ball, Peat.