Divination
The mind, Imhotep, it has a mind of its own.
When I say your incantation, a dark spirit visits me.
It has a human heart with all its chambers and valves.
A famished, skin and bones heart.
It would be mere gristle in your teeth.
The spirit says only that
The metronome stops before the world can see it;
This and nothing more.
Which of your siblings curses me?
I see their white skeletons in the sand.
M.G. Hofmann is a Milwaukee area-based writer. Her work has been featured in Dying Dahlia Review, and Eastern Iowa Review: Ten Debut Authors Edition. When she is not writing, she can be found outdoors or anywhere else one admires beauty. She can be contacted at mghofmann19@gmail.com
Statement by Featured Artist, Shelley Thomas: I sat with this poem for some time, reading and rereading lines, finding myself drawn in by its dark images. Descriptions read like incantations. Images conjured like curses. The beat of the metronome, matched by the beat of waves against a rock. I imagined a shore filled with bones, dark swirling visions of mutation and decay. The subject of the photograph induced the same unease when I first stumbled upon it. It is the pharyngeal “throat” teeth of a sheepshead fish, the last gill arch found at the back of the fish’s head. The stuff of nightmares.
Art: “Untitled,” 2018 (Lake Erie, Canada)