Gamut Magazine
Issue #1

Maria

By: Kiki Petrosino

(Originally published in Witch Wife.)

She’d appear in the break before sleep.
Her face a glass zero. Her dark buzzing.
I was twelve. I sweated & begged

to live. Back then, I believed she could
spike me with faith, a silverweed stolon—
she’d appear in the break before sleep

pronouncing my name in her language
of radial burn. Name, name, name, name.
I was twelve. I sweated & begged

in the dark. My sins hummed between
us a ravel of birds, a lightning smell.
She’d appear in the break before sleep

& drift close. As if my face
were hitched to a track which pulled her.
But I was twelve. I sweated & begged

until she dissolved: empty oval of air.
Now I can’t think what I wished for instead.
How I sweated & begged in the break before
sleep. I was twelve. I was twelve. I was twelve.

Kiki Petrosino is the author of White Blood: a Lyric of Virginia (2020) and three other poetry books, all from Sarabande. She holds graduate degrees from the University of Chicago and the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop. Her memoir, Bright, was released from Sarabande in 2022. She directs the Creative Writing Program at the University of Virginia, where she is a Professor of Poetry. Petrosino is the recipient of a DeWitt Wallace/Readers Digest fellowship from MacDowell artist residency, a Pushcart Prize, a Fellowship in Creative Writing from the National Endowment for the Arts, the UNT Rilke Prize, & the Spalding Prize, among other honors.