Kristina Marie Darling

Kristina Marie Darling

Kristina Marie Darling is a student at Washington University in St. Louis.

Her poetry has appeared in or is forthcoming in Offerings, Freefall, The Mid-America Poetry Review, The Neovictorian/Cochlea, Poetry Motel, 3 cup morning, Telicom, Wicked Alice, Baby Clam Press, Chantarelle's Notebook, Kritya, Parting Gifts, Dream Fantasy International, Toes, The Other Voices International Project, The Mad Hatter's Review, and Poetry Superhighway.

Her personal essays have appeared in or are forthcoming in Her Circle Ezine, SubteTea, Prose Toad, Zygote in My Coffee, and Quiet Mountain: New Feminist Essays.

A book of her poems, The Traffic in Women, is forthcoming from Dancing Girl Press.

She also attended the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop in 2004 and the Washington University Summer Writers Institute on a scholarship in 2005.
she can be reached-     Natalya178@aol.com

Opiate Seasons



My hair was still shaved down to the scalp the night I got his message. He was thirty-seven, five foot eleven. Rich like the old men with hooked noses. He didn’t care my teeth were chipped off, my physique that of an under-aged old woman without her wig and dentures. Don’t get me wrong, we all knew what he wanted. It was nine a.m. when he called. I’d been at church, sleeping in a hard plastic chair as my family praised Jesus, jumping like Mexican beans in the aisles of the shoddy cathedral.

I’d started pulling out my hair by the follicles when I was five. The hair came out willingly; it knew it didn’t belong. When there were a few locks left my mom whipped out the razor. And I was thirteen when the grinding started. I’d wake up, my jaws clenched tight like a rusted door.

Then Pembroke entered the toothless, bald, and mono-stricken scene. I was twenty-two and still living with my mom. He’d called to let me know he’d be in town for Christmas. We met online, and I wondered what was wrong with him. His photograph was flawless, but only from the neck up. The rest was variable, like the X in Calculus. His legs and torso could be anything, from frog to midget.

He made me feel like I had teeth. He was British like the men on Fig Newton Commercials, and dark like a burned out match.

In the morning I called. A woman’s voice nagged in the background. I knew it was too young for his mother, and hung up the phone. As I walked out to hit the bars, a small residue of snow gathered on my scalp. The drunken men said I looked like a cancer patient, their hot breath rank in the Minnesota air.