MNEMOSYNE
Granite chronotype
of a wishing bird
Who
luminescence
Great gathering of fossilized eyes upon the old memorial
Face of a jackal Mouth of a sound
Sharp chattering Wood
swoon
Real feathers
Dart !!! over a mannequin man
Something someone says
Someone says back
Fear once important
Crushing hand in hand
into the substrate of night
Little calamity
of rats
Tail like a love letter
Tell us who Who the bruise
was and why it for And why
why
Oil slick
MNEMOSYNE
NEW WORKER is getting sick of this
What was promised Was rescinded.
The industrial accident collapsed like a firebird
into its own creation Rose up again.
In the center of Capital man wearing allegory’s suit
shot dead by a man wearing the coat
of archetype
Much debate
about whether he deserved it
NEW WORKER can’t afford to be anyone
taking the risks toward a life.
Sometimes she wants to be a wife
Sometimes she wants to kill
Not metonymy Not mnemosyne
Assassins she’d take to bed any night
She pulled one muse from her eye
Crushed blueberries
in her hand
Tantamount to tax
God’s secretary
takes her tooth
as collateral
Seven Hundred
Dollar Health Insurance
Bill
How radical
Locomotive train
leaks green oil
all over the metropole
NEW WORKER told to clean it up
It keeps spreading around NEW
WORKER lays down on the tracks
because the demagogue owns the party
NEW WORKER does not dream
of labor NEW WORKER wants to fuck shit up
NEW WORKER
can’t say anything more:
it’s time to punch in
OR it’s time
to punch up
MNEMOSYNE
Organ floor Blood
sheen Climax The heart
is a great big balloon
NEW WORKER runs
her hands over a man on stilts Cirque
de so lame Beat
Beat
Beep
Fourteen dollars
for a drink @ the card
machine NEW WORKER swigs
from a stranger’s flask
Sangria Red fruit
LSD spikes a cardiogram of sight Time
teeths and fangs NEW WORKER kisses
a Wolf She undoes her hair
Wolf tells her he has worked
one week at the Capital
machine NEW WORKER feels like window
dressing in a degrading film What terrible
walls What porcelain face What big hands
you have The better to tear you apart
NEW WORKER swallowed by the heat
Spat out in a red room sweltering sweet
Wolf above her peeling off his fur
NEW WORKER removing her face
Mnemosyne Mnemosyne
MNEMOSYNE
Left the right
pair of my favorite earrings at his place
Almost died
St Francis pumps me full of adrenaline
Day
of Miracles No
you can’t leave just yet NEW WORKER
Snows thick and heavy Haloing
My neck a frozen coronet
Buses in parade along the drift
Citizens in frequent wool
and infrequent pallor
Their heart Their heat
The Beast asks:
Tell me about the error
of crisis Tell me about
the crisis in
the error I
collapsed
in his shower Shattered
my tooth Alone
He left me Oxygen
swooning out Body aflame
Sometimes I remember my name
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, Poetry Daily, 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.