Mikki Aronoff

Crossing into Belarus 

after Jennifer Givhan after Rilke
 
It’s as if  the ogres have filed off my family’s fingerprints / tethered their tongues to lost chronicles / magicked the border with rags / they’ve waved wands whittled from splintered limbs to raise walls of judgment & shame / I knock on doors, wallow in strangers’ narratives, wrap them with twine / I deduce my kin swilled butchery’s blades, gulped with sorrel & rye / sabered slices of flesh clog & pack like  fat / our blood like borscht,  thick Dnieper of unknowing / I try to be sly, ply them with dishes of buckwheat & kischke, dill chopped with ancestral knives / but / Bubbe curtains herself in tight cross-stitches, sutures her lips as she  re-works her cloak into knots / mother,  sharp-beaked lapwing,  trails pinion as if broken, lures me away from words / my father sits like iron ore, heavy in his hush / nights I hitch a ride on air / cross ocean / cross steppes / ford rivers / I settle near birch & pine, beaver & vole / emerge as moss / eavesdrop.

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This poem first appeared in bosque 9 and received a Pushcart nomination.

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Bucket List 
 
One night I had a dream. I watched a blue whale slap its tail on the calm ocean surface, saw green anacondas slick their way through the steamy Amazon. I ambled along the Left Bank observing painters painting lovers, drove a car through a hole carved through a giant sequoia. When I awoke, I thought this meant I was going to die. I went to my desk and filled my fountain pen to write my will. It skittered and scratched and blotched the page blue until I relented and replaced it in its stand.

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This first appeared in Microfiction Monday.

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The Mistress of Dreams 
 
The Mistress of Dreams watches from afar as your car veers to the side of the road, slides into the ravine. She sees you struggle to open the door, then tumble into a ditch. Your teeth are packed with mud, your feet are stuck in sludge. She pretends she’s not the one who shot out your tire, arrives later, like Roadside Assistance. The Mistress wipes your bewildered brow, hands you a basket of fire, a sieve of water, asks you to choose. You can’t have both. But you can’t speak. The mud in your mouth is hard as clay.
 
*
 
The Mistress of Dreams yanks and tugs at her girdle, shimmies its rigor. This makes her feel kind, and she drops a lover into your bed, your sheets freshly laundered, your phone silenced, your freshly-shaven legs parted and waiting. She strikes a match, lights the patchouli candle in the bedroom window, doesn’t notice the wind stirring the curtains. You frown at the men arriving with hoses. They don’t fit the ideal of firemen. Or lovers. They would never make the calendar.
 
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This first appeared in Unbroken Journal.

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​Nature/Nurture 
 
Neither with lightness of care nor limp neglect will my piteous green plants grow. Not here. But mother has trowels for hands, grit-pitted knees, eyes darkened by sun-hat’s shadow. She fusses over succulents, tucks them into rocks, soothes their crying parts. Below moon’s bright bulb, she sheds her skin, dives into leaves’ swollen flesh. She swims among their water-soaked cells, sips their celadon juices. Perhaps I’m missing some gene - snake plants and aloe wither on my watch. Her hands rattle and clang at me, but I harbour no ill towards plants. I just can’t bear their mewling.

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This first appeared in Fragmented Voices Anthology, and was nominated for the Pushcart Prize.

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​Thread 
 
1. Thread has no memory, thread has no mercy. Mercy is something you bestow. There is no bestowing with thread. Thread is dispassionate even though it is usually blamed for problems. Take tangling, for instance. You couldn’t tangle thread unless it was there to be tangled, so its presence makes it look guilty. Same for tethering. You could tie your dog or your uncle to a pole and they wouldn’t like it, especially if there’s no shade, but is it the tether’s fault? 
 
2. Cotton gin? Not what you think.
 
3. Playtime weaves jet and crimson dreams, takes her to the edge of the woods. A cowbell clangs her home. Her father is out back with the hose. He grows cotton plants, a dozen or so. It’s just a hobby. Her mother sits on the porch and waits for the bolls to open so she can spin and weave the fluffy fibers they encase.  Later, they’ll eat a dinner of leftovers off plastic placemats with scenes from Yellowstone and The Appalachian Trail, and then it’s early to bed.
 
4. To mercerize is to chemically treat fibres to impart strength and luster and reduce fabric shrinkage. Shrinkage is what happens when penis meets pool.
 
5. Break down a cotton plant and you get lint, seeds, seed hulls, stalks, stems or canes, roots, leaves, bolls, and flowers. Break down a flower and you get tears. When she (see #3) started to flower, someone stalked her. She was afraid to turn around and see who it was, but she was able to sense his shadow. She quickened her steps the closer she got to home.
 
6. Her grandmother took an old sheet, cut and sewed it and embroidered her a Russian peasant blouse for her birthday. She cross-stitched it red and black to mark the knots of their lives. The stain of revolution, of iron, weigh heavy. She is thirteen and wants a t-shirt.
 
7. Linters are the short fuzz on cotton plants. They provide cellulose for making plastics, explosives and other products, perhaps the tugging strings of tampons.
 
8. Ariadne’s Thread is a method for solving a problem with multiple apparent means of proceeding. Take our flowering stalkee (see #5). How can she evade that person? She could disguise herself, but for her scent. The stalker’s nostrils expand to take her in. Okay, let’s get real. Throw that guy in the clinker. Do you really want to lock up a budding young girl? No, you’d sit her down and talk to her. A lot. Until, years later, tired of her sulking, you send her away to college, where she has a crush on her physics professor. She fastens her eyes on his thighs, invents theories about cotton thread and crucibles. Her heat is need, is threat. Later, a real lover leaves her for another. Miffed, she stitches his photo between two pages of her sketchbook. Trapped, airless. Empath that she is, she starts gasping for air, runs to the bathroom in a panic. Where are her pills? Arachne scuds across the shower stall floor. Thin limbs, fire on the belly. Black widow. She nearly slips on the tile floors escaping to the bedroom. She opens the window, sticks her head out over the fire escape. She cannot read the stars, as the city lights are too bright in the muggy heat. She unravels some, then some more, then rewinds her way back to bed. Problem solved.
 
9. A Harlequin Dane lugs his tonnage past her and a Vietnam vet in the coffee line, gets them talking of their fondness for oversized dogs. Both of them now too old to manage. Their thirst knits them till they get to the counter. She drives home, not recognizing the flesh and fur that flanked her that morning. Someone’s walking little dogs just like mine. Her dog-walker on his phone. All sense spooling from her head. 
 
10. Cotton belongs to the genus Gossypium but learned early to keep its mouth shut. It knows what kind of trouble telling tales out of school can bring (see #1-9). 
 
11. She careens between the moistness of stream banks. 
 
Blessed thread, holy filament, 
tie my heat to my wanting, 
flame my dread,
make safe my travels.  
 
Skeins of copper wire bird-nesting the dark. 

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This first appeared in The Fortnightly Review.

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Mikki Aronoff’s work appears in New World Writing, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Tiny Molecules, HAD, Bending Genres, Milk Candy Review, Gone Lawn, Mslexia, The Dribble Drabble Review, 100 word story, The Citron Review, Atlas and Alice, trampset, jmww, The Offing, Midway Journal, The Ekphrastic Review, and elsewhere. She’s received Pushcart, Best of the Net, Best Small Fictions, Best American Short Stories, and Best Microfiction nominations.