Verum, n. This rough star crackling in the broken pot, slipping the acrid red fumes, into my eyes jags in the flow of hot syrup, like the long nails of a delicate and unwashed child trailing her fingers across the glass of a cool lake covered in moss, moss-covered. The hard bark spiny and alert, the banks like wounds, along the mud-red shores, my nose burns with the acidic blood lake, the slow spin of the star singing ‘Oh sink, sink, sink.’                 Erin Emily Ann Vance’s work has appeared in numerous journals, including Contemporary Verse 2 and filling station. She was a 2017 recipient of the Alberta Foundation for…