Mantis 22 (Summer 2024)
Disillusion; Dissolution
A. J. Bermudez
Missing
You live in this table, invisibly
streaked with the oil from your hands.
Your breath is in the walls, married
to powdered plaster and egg white lustre.
The light from this same sun is blinding
you, someplace else.
You are in the air that blows across
the strait.
Somewhere, beneath your feet, on another continent, you
stand and the dust moves for you.
A. J. BERMUDEZ is an award-winning writer and filmmaker who currently serves as Editor of The Maine Review and Visiting Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Miami. Her work has been featured at the Yale Center for British Art, Sundance, the LGBT Toronto Film Festival, and in a number of literary publications, including The Kenyon Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, Boulevard, Story, and elsewhere. She is a former boxer and EMT, a current Steinbeck Fellow and Lambda Award Finalist, and is a winner of the Pushcart Prize, the Diverse Voices Award, the Page Award, the Alpine Fellowship Writing Prize, and the Iowa Short Fiction Award.