- how this all started in the first place
- teeth, and why it feels so good to unclench our jaws, crack the window just enough to warm the sill, to run our tongues along something simultaneously foreign and familiar
- parts of us from past lives, holding their hands up to one another in the afternoon stillness, pressing palms to palms, fingertips to fingertips. same, they’ll say
- the aerial view of it all, the cold morning mist along the ascent, the sensation of a rise and fall, chests out and in. expand
- and collapse
- and the bitter, metallic taste of biting down too hard
- the attempt to clean the crimson aftermath and find some solid ground before the midnight blackness swallows us whole
- because something was planted here and I don’t know if I have the heart to rip it out by the roots and, speaking of, the copper chasm in my heart chakra, opened all the way up and
- teeth, again, and the dreams I keep having where they clatter to the ground around me, like seedlings, and you help me collect them with a knowing gentleness that makes me ache for
- how this all started in the first place.
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Aubri Kaufman is a writer and a therapist from New Jersey. She is the co-founder and co-EIC of Icebreakers Lit. Her work can be found in Pidgeonholes, HAD, The Daily Drunk, and elsewhere. She wants to talk to you on Twitter – @aubrirose.
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image: Ashley Beresch. Check out more of her work on Instagram @ashleyberesch
Rejection Letters 