Danielle Zipkin (she/her) lives in Brooklyn with her husband, plants, plecostomus, and roomba. She has poems published or forthcoming in The Golden Shovel Anthology: New Poems Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks, Expressions of Awe, Humana Obscura, SamFiftyFour, A La Moda, VAINE Magazine, and elsewhere. When she’s not educating middle schoolers, writing, or quarantining, she enjoys dancing, scuba diving, and getting lost in bookstores. Instagram: @dalyssaz

On daughters wielding chicken wings

If a body part is ever honest, my knuckles
wear plain their tight-curled desperation
to belly my mother’s breath and music
most while harmonica-holding her barbecue
chicken wings, sauce clotting in the grooves
of both my hungry hands, thick as lineage.

Consider my fingers halfway hers, posing
the careful cuts she charred like temple
gifts for jealous gods towards my own
teeth. Consider those bones descending
like a second mouth, pulled from my own,
each knobby edge painting red dimples
that measure just how much wider her wing
stretches beyond my smile. Consider my face,
stained like a Passover doorframe warning
the rest of the plate, consider my fingers
twisting the baring bones like a cartoon villain
schemes a mustache. I lick each finger between
skeleton and skin repetition with the birthright
rude of a child who hasn’t yet left her mother’s
kitchen to rent her own in a cold midwest.

And here, at my mother’s table, a man
who loves me offers advice like a napkin
I refuse to wipe my mouth with, models
a one-handed grip that keeps the right hand
unmessed. His left pinched hold on the wing
is confident as a lazy hinge, his hand half mine
trusting that the meat is as dead as promised
by the shrink wrap. Here, I consider my own
sticky hands, and all of the choreographies
I have ever been advised to unlearn:
my mom, disappearing pieces of my childhood
blanket that she sewed and then shame
surgeried away in amputated patches; or
my best friend in the bathroom conjuring
a brush from her backpack like a tired trick
to correct my ponytail angle. Audienced
at the plate, I half handle the next wing,
lift it towards the right side of my mouth
the way I once raised a sticky, ribbed
wand close to my lips to blow soft,
clean bubbles into the air, unafraid then
of things flying out from my grasp,
unafraid then of every silent burst.

Online Education

Flame disorients
those who dentist
unassuming
cave mouths
with loose tooth
shadow play,
alchemies hungry
retinas into quick
tightening fists,
like screen glare
down the barrel
of a child’s eyes.

A president tweets
and somewhere
a finger is clicking
follow, and a flag
is dangling by its
heels, and a child
is learning to spell
America’s name.