Callista Buchen is the author of Look Look Look, forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press in October 2019, and the chapbooks The Bloody Planet (Black Lawrence Press, 2015) and Double-Mouthed (dancing girl press, 2016). Her work appears in Harpur Palate, Puerto del Sol, Fourteen Hills, and many other journals, and she is the winner of the Langston Hughes Award and DIAGRAM's essay contest. She teaches at Franklin College, where she advises the student literary journal and directs the visiting writers' reading series. ---------
Borderland
How she measures the days and their small bodies against her own. The child curled against her arm, against her ribs, the toddler on her chest. Everyone is breathing. She builds her body into home, into refuge, tries to fall into the moment like a well.
Her body is a fortress. Her body is a monument. She wants to say, but where is the original map? But where have we buried my body? You can’t ask this of children. She grows stiff, tries to hold them until she becomes a door, and they all walk through.