Sari Krosinsky

THE MOSS ON THE STAIRS ISN'T CLIMBING

Listen to the audio version.

The sidewalks and bridges, the stone walls of our new city are growing, furred with moss. Mold spores black fronds
in the puddles around our sink. Even the damp folds of my nervous system are growing: green, black and furred red, toxic

and nourishing. People tell me how brave I am, starting over like this. I don’t
understand. I didn’t spore in this new puddle, only splashed down, still myself.

I’ve been watching the last of the move-in bruises fade, the one that came not from boxes but my fist. The silhouette of palm and pinky is faintest stain
seventeen days since you asked me to stop hurting myself, "Please," and I held back my hands along with the howling I’d dammed with blows.

You’d hoped the good sea air would heal me. It does. You hoped it would heal me
more. I want to tell you: This is life: how it feeds, how it poisons. The same act.

* * *

TOLLBOOTHS ON THE ROAD TO ADULTHOOD

Listen to the audio version.

For my 14th birthday, I decided it was time to stop sucking my thumb. The stars slipped over Albuquerque through the window of my brother’s car—so many more of them 24 years ago, if memory hasn’t multiplied and magnified their light, the way my senses magnify every soundwave, every photon, every touch—and I smiled in grim concession to what everyone said growing up meant. For my 38th birthday, I’m still not sure growing up is anything I want to do. In the transit center where buses and vents pour an airfall louder than water could ever pound bare rock, unable to soothe myself with thumb navigating stalagmite teeth to find and fit the slick cavern dome, I anchor my fingers in the sheer rock of my arm, excavate five bruises before I know I’m hurting myself. To stick fingers in mouth like a baby at a bus station would be humiliating. The bruises, hidden by my sleeve, are all grown up.

Sari Krosinsky is a queer autistic writer. Ze has written three books of poetry, Courting Hunger (2015), A God’s Life (2015) and god-chaser (CW Books 2012) and co-authored a chapbook, Yossele: a tale in poems (2010), with Robert Arthur Reeves. Ze received an M.A. in creative writing from the University of New Mexico. Ze lives in Bremerton, Washington, with zir partner, Reeves.