Open Window with Breeze and Dahlias.

CW content warning

Content warning for references to inpatient care.

Open Window with Breeze and Dahlias.

Sunlight inundates as I sit silent, repose
and contemplate paper cut-outs strewn
all across the floor: little pools of colour,
bright autumnal tangle, walk in

the woods. This one will bejewel a king,
that one evoke a nudity, the crisp turn of
an ankle. This orange rectangle is a paper
thrown: each storyline is possible.

I learned imagination at the hospital:
off-white and peeling off, the walls recite
not a lament but an invitation. If you
could decipher a cloud, you can outline

a folktale in these cracks. Here it is, see:
the face of my mother, and there a wolf,
there a sad musician re-stringing his old
mandolin. I lose, or gain,

hours in these daily contemplations.
my work of scissors and glue sticks now
done, I contemplate a leaf like a branch
of coral, urgent and delicate. No time

is lost that is spent doing nothing much.

Lorelei Bacht

(she/they)

Lorelei Bacht lives and writes somewhere in the monsoon forest. Her recent writing has appeared and/or is forthcoming in Feral, Anti-Heroin Chic, Abridged, Odd Magazine, PROEM, SWWIM, Strukturriss, The Inflectionist Review, Hecate, and others. She is also on Instagram @lorelei.bacht.writer and on Twitter @bachtlorelei.