Rachel Mallino / 309.81

Rachel lives in Charlotte, North Carolina with her husband, daughter and various lovable animals. She is the founding editor for Tilt Press, a small print press dedicated to publishing beautiful chapbooks exclusively for emerging poets (individuals who have not yet published a chapbook or full length collection of work). You can read Rachels poetry in various online and print journals including 42opus, BOXCAR Poetry Review (anthologized), Memorious, Arsenic Lobster, Pebble Lake Review, Stirring, Wicked Alice, and others. She has a mini e-chap, ANTI, available from Gold Wake Press. Her first chapbook, Inside Bone Theres Always Marrow, is available from Maverick Duck Press.

III. in this house: strands of hair

strewn wildly inside the bathroom sink; spread across
the ceramic floor; lodged low in the showers throat
like knots of words. I know to stay silent, to obey,
to clean this wreck of a place. My earthy hair
a gesture that I am my father, and you- a
vessel. You shuck my scalp all the way down
Main Street, nothing but a face-off between myself
and asphalt. You hope for magic, these locks of wool
to vanish like a hat-trick because a bald head is nostalgic:
when all there is to understand of the world
is the shape of a mothers face.