How to Prepare

Pull your hair tightly into a high pony tail Make it tighter still. There is something to be said for immaculate strands and their fraying roots.   Memorize the story of King Solomon and the baby so that the sensation of being severed in half becomes as familiar as breathing. Read more

Lydia A. Cyrus

Lydia A. Cyrus is a creative writer from Huntington, West Virginia. She has non-fiction work featured in several journals, including Luna Luna Magazine where she serves as a staff writer. Her poems can found in places like Quail Bell Magazine and Moonchild Mag. She is a proud Mountain Woman and loves her dog.

Kiss Them For Me

My body is a temple, which I will not desecrate. The phrase “virgin blood” is misleading. It means blood that has not previously been used in a sacrifice, not the blood of a virgin. Even that explanation is misleading because isn’t sex a sacrifice? Do you not open up yourself Read more

Lydia A. Cyrus

Lydia A. Cyrus is a creative writer from Huntington, West Virginia. She has non-fiction work featured in several journals, including Luna Luna Magazine where she serves as a staff writer. Her poems can found in places like Quail Bell Magazine and Moonchild Mag. She is a proud Mountain Woman and loves her dog.

Violets

after Courtney Love Tiny, four leaf vibrating and glistening. Sprouted on the hillside of her yard, listening to the murmur of cutting blades. The size of dimes, drops of ink. Theirs is a secret fragility when held in hand, they would crinkle from the July heat. Delicate not for the Read more

Lydia A. Cyrus

Lydia A. Cyrus is a creative writer from Huntington, West Virginia. She has non-fiction work featured in several journals, including Luna Luna Magazine where she serves as a staff writer. Her poems can found in places like Quail Bell Magazine and Moonchild Mag. She is a proud Mountain Woman and loves her dog.

Letters I Wrote to Muriel Rukeyser During My Title IX Investigation

“Speak to me. / Take my hand. / What are you now? / I will tell you all. / I will conceal nothing.”   When I was three I broke my father’s nose with a bat. He said he never had migraines before that day, but now has them frequently. Read more

Lydia A. Cyrus

Lydia A. Cyrus is a creative writer from Huntington, West Virginia. She has non-fiction work featured in several journals, including Luna Luna Magazine where she serves as a staff writer. Her poems can found in places like Quail Bell Magazine and Moonchild Mag. She is a proud Mountain Woman and loves her dog.

I Don’t Want People to Talk About Me the Way They Talk about Dorothy Allison

Woman with crooked teeth smashed one over another from an accident causing neurotic self-awareness.   Woman whose belt loops have come undone leaving dime size, holes in the denim that does not fit,   because she could not afford better. Woman with brown eyes that betray, translating silence into pain Read more

Lydia A. Cyrus

Lydia A. Cyrus is a creative writer from Huntington, West Virginia. She has non-fiction work featured in several journals, including Luna Luna Magazine where she serves as a staff writer. Her poems can found in places like Quail Bell Magazine and Moonchild Mag. She is a proud Mountain Woman and loves her dog.

Billy Graham is Dead

I sit in my mother’s lap and she cries, my father is enraged, my younger brother promises he would never ever treat a woman badly. He would never try to violate someone. My family members were not evangelicals— they were parishioners of a different kind, Baptists. When I read the Read more

Lydia A. Cyrus

Lydia A. Cyrus is a creative writer from Huntington, West Virginia. She has non-fiction work featured in several journals, including Luna Luna Magazine where she serves as a staff writer. Her poems can found in places like Quail Bell Magazine and Moonchild Mag. She is a proud Mountain Woman and loves her dog.