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  • Since all your friends
  • A. Molotkov (bio)

decided to sleep inside your body, you’ve had the plumbing to consider.The picky ones expect their own rooms to engage in odd private acts.These demands perplex the surgeon as she folds your dermisand moves around your fat layers, forming a judgment about their abundance.What scares you is not sharing yourself—you are used to it—it’s all the air your friends will exhale. It’s how much airyou’ve shared, already. You might let them down by not breathing enough.You might suffocate your friends trapped inside you.Will you cry when the coroner extracts them from your body,or did you cry long ago, knowing everything, perpetually hurting in advance? [End Page 51]

A. Molotkov

A. Molotkov was born in Russia, moved to the United States in 1990, and switched to writing in English in 1993. His work has been published or is forthcoming in Kenyon Review, Iowa Review, Cincinnati Review, Raleigh Review, Cider Press Review, Pif, 2 River, and many more. Molotkov has won New Millennium Writings and Koeppel fiction contests, two poetry chapbook contests, and a 2015 Oregon Literary Fellowship. A full-length poetry collection, The Catalog of Broken Things, was published by Airlie Press in October 2016. His new translation of a Chekhov story was included by Knopf in their Everyman Series. Visit him at AMolotkov.com

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