Author: Julie Doxsee

Julie Doxsee holds a PhD in English and Creative Writing from the University of Denver and currently lives in Istanbul on the European shores of the Bosphorus. She teaches creative writing, academic writing, and literature courses at Koç University, a private university near the Black Sea. Her current publications include "Undersleep" by Octopus Books, "New Body a Seafloor Body" by Mindmade Books, The Knife-Grasses by Octopus Books, and "Fog Quartets" by horse less press.

This biography was taken from her blog, Brachylogia.

Monsterless & Ganges Spirit

Monsterless

My soul fell out and fell almost straight down the stairs, then he half-smiled and I found a baby scorpion in his eye. The encounter with my house is lovely today because I found, also, a smile under the chair in the sunroom and my bruises disappeared after which I fainted because I was glad to be no longer pulverized like a saint. In fact his eyes watched me until I turned a higher temperature and vanished into the wall and onto the slightest glimmer.

The magic 8 ball gave an answer and I want you to reply that the encounter was not one of putting two and two together. If I were a smile I would get bitten into. It terrifies me that the world contains the sentence: No one here has to see me.

Ganges Spirit

I am a hash mark full of pocket holes, taken from the journal of a hunchbacked man on his way to the noose. The ox is too big and the cardboard box nary hammered. In the bicycling wilderness, a fort depicts big waistbands the glory birds emerge from. And what would emerge is a horrifying template full of systems and formulas, beak-marks and lion tongues, gasping in the rain for the rain you loved. I can’t understand the limits under-planking the shavings of water, ships burning on the straight while a lone man plays cowbell with a copper baton. Who went limping past to plea for a suicide near the yellow tree with a big blue eye painted on it? I want your teeth to bite a different kind of me until it compliments the blood. Do you understand how to turn yourself into an infinite reflection whose head always obscures the view? The messy histories of a bird running over puddles. The messy histories of a salt factory. Hounds, hounds, hounds on the suffering banks – what of them? We barge in so delicately in slippers made of down, made of holy petals, made of milk.