If I must die young, bury me in a music box. I’ll be the pale ballerina with dirt in her hair. Attach my painless feet to metal springs and open the lid when you visit. Watch me rise and pirouette, my arms overhead tickling the dark night’s belly until I’m dizzy, until the stars melt and spiral into a halo over my head, and I’ve stirred my death into the sky.

— Jalina Mhyana

I’m considering keeping the shutters open, even if people are spying on me at night from the apartment across the street. Especially if they are spying on me. It makes me feel less alone. I have a mental camaraderie with that imaginary person and their imaginary gaze. I find myself performing myself for them and exaggerating my facial expressions so they can see me more clearly, like actors project their voices on stage. Furthermore, I’m miming myself.

— Jalina Mhyana

It dawns on me that maybe I'm just terrifically lazy; that I might be appropriating other people’s invisible sicknesses and disorders and scribbling them on the clipboard at the end of my bed to fool the nurses; so I can indulge in rest cures all day, every day. That I’m even fooling myself.

— Jalina Mhyana

I was his “little girl with the William Burroughs mind,” his “secret fairy,” “female Frank Zappa” and “window onto a magical world.” He said I fell to earth, leaving wing-marks on the ceilings of our dreams.

— Jalina Mhyana

My husband and I have always been good at creative visualization. Before we quit drugs and got married he’d place tabs of acid on his eyes to see things that weren't there. I'd lay blank sheets of photographic paper on the cornea of developing solution to conjure images. We'd always coaxed dreams from paper, and believed them.

— Jalina Mhyana

Offerings gleam beneath consecrated trees, boulders, and caves where Kami nature spirits minister to congregations of Saki cans, lotus root, and the glow of tangerines; still-lives silent as prayer.

— Jalina Mhyana

Our divorce was an optical illusion, surely, because I am often still there, in my old home with my family. I can so easily fool myself, even without a scope, a lens, a patch of sky to measure my trauma, my blues, my perspective or my period of mourning. Suspension of disbelief can be a very real kind of haunting.

— Jalina Mhyana

The Wishing Bones thousand grandmothers ago Pyrrha and Deucalion repopulated the world with rocks, bones of mother Earth, a generation of my ancestors strained from the mud of a drowned planet. But I’m more interested in my earliest grandmothers, their gills and wetness, before they crawled from that blue expanse and learned to carry the sea within them, in their cells, between their cells, in their eyes. The buoyancy of ocean has never left us. It hides in skin’s complex reservoir where we're selectively permeable, and our bodies exchange the smallest life. If we had no need to distinguish ourselves from others we’d be missing the skin that defines lovers and enemies and opens itself to both.

— Jalina Mhyana

Transparent tubes divided Phil’s blood into shades of red, fading to straw colored plasma. I watched his fluid swirl past his shoulders and disappear into machines. He offered himself to blood banks all over the city, his plasma rushed to hospitals where it would circulate through other people’s bodies. The map of my love’s tapped arteries would look like a bloodshot eye over the city of Albuquerque. His blood bought us dinner. I dreamed he was my mother, and I nursed his arm. I wrote a poem about it, how I suckled his arm dry like a sore teat.

— Jalina Mhyana

Veins of ivy scale stones, find footholds butte caretaker cuts earth short, peels creepers from Cotswold rock and props the deadhead to head so they won’ttopple like drunk son their moss-soft shadows.

— Jalina Mhyana