prose poems from guest contributors: 8 Lania Knight

A Bite of Blood Orange

Now that we aren't speaking, strands of you wend this way and that, behind my very eyes where I cannot pluck them out. Your lower lip, the knot inside your wrist, the char and gravel of your voice, they speak my name. In a dream, I am a girl sitting in a school bus amongst schoolmates, my legs bent this way and that so my feet, bare, are stuck right there in the middle of it all. But no one minds. They laugh and giggle, and I eat my blood orange, each segmented bit a tangle of your hair. The fruit fills me, the girls huddled round me and my naked feet. And, now that we're no longer speaking, I look for you in the linger of stain on my fingers.


© Lania Knight




Lania Knight's first book, Three Cubic Feet, was a 2012 Finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Debut Fiction. Her stories, essays, and interviews are widely published. Her second book, Remnant, is due out in 2017. She is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Gloucestershire. Read more about her at www.laniaknight.com.