Cassandra Atherton
Fully Justified
You catch my breath as it floats under a room of words; it warms your palms before easing through the spaces between your fingers, rising like a High C. In this snuggery we are a fragment of ourselves, a line without an ending, a gap in the kerning. Between your sheets I am your skin and my heart, an ecstasy of limbs. When I leave your bed, my corpus haunted by your touch, I’m not sure what you will remember and how much time will smooth the edges of our ragged right margin.
Cassandra Atherton is an award-winning prose poet, academic, and critic. She was a Harvard Visiting Scholar in English in 2016. Cassandra has published eight books of prose poetry, including Exhumed (2015), Trace (2015), Pika-don (2018), and Pre- Raphaelite (forthcoming), and her prose poetry has been widely anthologized. Cassandra has judged prestigious national writing awards including the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards and was recently awarded a VicArts grant and an Australian Council Grant for her prose poetry on the atomic bomb. She is the poetry editor of Westerly Magazine.