Elusive

Ice snaps in a glass,
the sound sharp as a gunshot,
clean against a whisper
heavy with too much lipstick.
Smoke blurs outlines,
tasting like whisky, rum, danger.
Sax, trumpet, dream-voiced crooner
wail and tease, dancing notes
trying to cover the gurgling hiss
of the still underneath the floor. 
Don’t say the password
unless your lips
are pressed against the right crack
in the right door.

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Mārta Ziemelis is a Tkaronto (Toronto)-based emerging poet and established literary translator. Her poetry has appeared in The Ice Colony, CRUSH Zine, the Sapphic Writers Collective zine Out Of The Wardrobe and South Broadway Ghost Society. Her Latvian-English translations include "Do you exist, or did my mind invent you?", a poem by Gunta Micāne (TransLit Volume 11: An Anthology of Literary Translations, 2017), two short stories in the anthology The Book of Riga (Comma Press, 2018), and Narcoses, a poetry collection by Madara Gruntmane, co-translated with Richard O'Brien (Parthian, 2018).