in parentheses

Rhienna Renée Guedry (she/they) is a writer, illustrator, and producer whose favorite geographic locations all have something to do with their proximity to water. A two-time Pushcart Prize nominee and 2022 Tin House Workshop alum, her work has appeared in Muzzle, Maudlin House, Gigantic Sequins, and elsewhere. Her debut chapbook Root Rot is available from Cooper Dillon Books. Rhienna is currently working on her first novel. Find out more about her projects at rhienna.com.

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WHAT YOU’RE WAITING FOR

Tuesday. Unceremonious weekday. Seasonal allergy season. Waxing crescent or whatever moon phase nobody ever talks about. Today’s the day. Tonight’s the night. The time you flipped your hair over a speckled shoulder like a pony. The time you finally did not wince when you realized it was your mother’s birthday. The day you stopped saving it, the day you spent it, the day you consumed it. Before it expired. After its sell-by date. (Otherwise, it is hoarding. You already have a problem with freeboxes.) Waste not, want not—it’s how you were raised. You tell everyone how you are unlearning. This is your only inheritance. So you taught yourself how to savor instead. It stings to keep looking towards an unspecified future. Uncertainty abounds. Intake. This is a thing you can do for yourself. The fruits are your own. A wine cellar is an investment in a future you may not be around for. When you die, let there be no pile of treasures that never earned a debut. Lap it up, learn to swallow, show your teeth.

KITCHEN LESSONS

The biggest sharpest knife has my favorite weight I use it to cut across a mound of basil
like a sundial, this movement I learned from watching You dice as casually
as you pair socks on laundry day it’s your one-line comedy routine
of a culinary school dropout: I paid thirty thousand dollars
to learn how to cut things the same size Before you and I
were common law I used a secondhand steak knife
for everything, cucumbers to pancakes
But O how the tables have turned, and
while we dispute our preferred
density of pasta we agree
it should be boiled in
water that tastes
like the sea

In your wake you leave a little constellation of tomato tops on the butcher block

Last year you bought me
a rice cooker that plays a melody
when the rice is done Gifts are my love language
so if your acts of service are poems then mine are songs
of faith and devotion Sometimes mouths are a gift, sometimes
ingestion is physical touch Who’s keeping score when we have all of this
I knew this the first night I watched you transfer the triangles of a quesadilla
to my blue plate, each slice with your hands as gently as if cupping a moth to take it outside

KEEP OUT

For us, it was February, before
the blossoms came, and before the hail
we had not expected
when we started covering
our mouths and noses
Xs over the eyes
like Xs like exes like kisses and hugs
bolted seams
of metal on metal, worn
lock and warped key

That was when we first found the leak
soft as a plastic bag adrift in a riverbed

Think of a secret you shared
How long did it take
for you to learn
that the truth isn’t watertight?

We do what we can
to keep the good air.
Here’s the trick:
know when to hold
your breath, know
when to swallow
the key if you share your space
with beasts

MORTAL THINGS AND THE FAULTLINES OF MEN

Our descendant of wolves hunts by scent, light-limbed as those who bred this tiny thing to helplessness, as if feral was something to fix. I thought I was feral, too, rushed silver footed with teeth gnashed, but it was all bluff and no follow-through and no way yet to know any better. Relentless sounds like dashed bird wings—rustling of nests we hurry to prepare—something like how women’s speech evolved to take up the space between thoughts, so used to being interrupted, which makes me think of how the French use la liaison. Throats raw from clearing them, the shape of filler, bound for spackle, we learn to filibust a swell of the sound of knowing, my own cadence spun into something louder, ripe, a heft they couldn’t so easily unfurl, but they’re too primed to eclipse: a whole world of their relentlessness, voluminous and used to it, I’ve never said take it down a notch without scanning the exits. Wouldn’t that be what the men of history owe the rest of us? Silence? Use their voices to save us instead of kill us all, for once.

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