confluence of tworivers, vanishingedge of each.red stones turnmouths upto their ownpiecemealtaking. intestinesanchoring underwater.a pail plunges in.is carried to town.then belfry. bombast.churchbells boom.their reverberationswrench openmy thin edges.torso rotatingin circles. I turnwithinwithin.I am a dollinside a doll.braiding grassinto bodies.bodies intofields.as the manwith an obsidianlantern gallops by.my mother sortspebblesat her table.a scarlet candlerises taller.yes, I know howto cleaveto sorrow’swhetstone.how to be a knife.before night. I burn milkthistle. a lockof my hair.ambergris.an other meclaws outof my throat.wet. blessed.babbling.she’s the real one.until anotherslinks out.I am noordinary woman.I swallow a rat.sip at the liverof a huntsman.bleed like a doein the meadowof memory.semen weepsfrom the mouthof an iris.seeing is sex.speaking is sex.utterance isa fetish.that’s why I always stopmyself. before the end.so I might always begin.again.
Matryoshka
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“Matryoshka” from BATTALION SHAPED GIRL: by Temperance Aghamohammadi.
Published by Discount Guillotine on September 1, 2025.
Copyright © 2025 by Temperance Aghamohammadi.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Temperance Aghamohammadi is an Acolyte of the Exquisite. A trans Iranian-American poet, medium, and critic, she is the author of BATTALION SHAPED GIRL (DISCOUNT GUILLOTINE, 2025) and Behnt (New Delta Review, forthcoming), selected by Dorothea Lasky as the winner of The New Delta Review Chapbook Prize. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Kenyon Review, The Yale Review, New England Review, Fairy Tale Review, and elsewhere. She is an associate editor at RHINO Poetry and received the Claudia Emerson scholarship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Hailing from the Northeast, she currently haunts the Midwest while pursuing a PhD in Literature.
“Who but an oracle ought to become in our present battlefields of embargoed being and (un)sanctioned brutality? Who but an oracle of riotous sense and ecstatic vision could so incisively depict ‘desire’s exit / wound’ and ‘futures refracting in the rip.’ Temperance Aghamohammadi’s Battalion Shaped Girl is a rhapsodic, occult debut.”
—Aditi Machado, author of Material Witness
“Part anthem, part Victorian rock ballad, these rhapsodic lyrics dazzle, documenting what it is like to be girl, doll, daughter, alive in times of atrocity in one’s homeland and one’s ancestral home. Forugh Farrokhzad lines the skeleton of this book, with traces of Lucie Brock-Broido’s numinous syntax lingering between the pages. ‘My life is happening again,’ the speaker says, and it is such voyeuristic luck to witness their life.”
—Diana Khoi Nguyen, author of Root Fracture
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