No one fixed anything. She sat before the keyboard and as she waited she cased the room. Doorways to the north and south into wide halls, men and women in armchairs and wheelchairs strewn about like boulders. Daylight casting shadows of window muntins like bars. She could feel an ache inside the cast on her ankle.

Menstrua Shun: [shun = (.)]

unlucky monthly / femin / posi / (.) /
uter / (impure) / ine / untouch / avoid men /
communal bathing / banned from the kitch / (.) /

Here, autumn owns the savor of a dying man,
burning man Man who has spent years on a journey searching for where to call home,

And now we have this. A sliver of a sliver
of joy we planted, in a plot full of loam
and pigeon croons.

I visited the Basilica of la Virgen de Guadalupe.
Your favorite advocation. It was your birthday.
The year was 2015. You had been gone
Four years already. I was alone.

Amelie Meltzer is a San Francisco native studying in Pittsburgh, PA. She is a medical student and activist, working to address racial bias in healthcare and promote the needs of queer and gender nonconforming patients. She writes poetry and nonfiction.