SERENA SOLIN

Cornmeal

flecking the underside of a pizza
is what signifies home to her
a mouthful of stucco a bite of tomato

games best played with a cigarette on your lip
at the slipshod neon beachside arcadia

games you need a roll of quarters to play
a shake of red pepper makes it even hotter
when she goes home she eats many pizzas

and tries to memorize eating them
above her apartment a goose screams
at night and then flies off somewhere

My Face in a Surveillance Camera

When I looked away, I was instantly transmuted.

Pacheco’s iconography for the Immaculate Conception dictates that Mary should be standing on the moon.

Velázquez obeyed but left the orb transparent.

The fused horizon between an unpaved parking lot and night.

A blue and red light on a pole mimics an approaching police car.

A man whose living is talking waits to hear if he has cancer of the mouth.

He hosts the show I put on when I drive, drifting from my home life, work life, sex life, and what else?

Unbolt the calm and what spills out is emergency, veiled by tumbling fabrics and white smoke.

I imagine my face splashed across the landlord’s computer screen.

Serena Solin is a writer from New Jersey. Her work has appeared in The Atlas Review, The Oakland Arts Review, Denver Quarterly, and tammy journal.