Jackie Delaney

Virgo season

End of summer sunflowers, chopped off heads rolling in the yard for the squirrels.

Seeds shelled open between teeth, a small pile in the grass next to me.

The one day we laid out on the trampoline with no sunscreen on. Bodies pink.

There are new kids in the neighborhood now. The hose stretched out into the yard.

Houses sold, pools filled in, trees split. One summer, head lice. One summer, fire.

Plastic sticking to the back of thighs. The metal watering can knocking against shins.

Planting geraniums and the dog pulling them out. Peeing in a bathing suit under the pine trees.

I stand for a photo next to the sunflowers to show how tall they are. My birthday is soon.

There’s always the throat. Or a new apartment, or a new city. This year,

Molly’s old clawfoot bathtub. A pink party hat, and Michael in it, and

the diabetic cat who loves him. Fire escape tomatoes, and hanging out halfway

to smell the heavy air. This one and every year, a little wiser. Wilder.

The waiting room purple

The grief on everything, unstable. Margarita in a can and feeling sorry into your salad. We pass a dead bird and I tell you not to look down. Everyone all the time now: we don’t know what the future hums. All we can do is wane. On the sidewalk, two teenagers lift a butterfly with a broken wing. Walking back from your place I see it flickering still on the cemetery fence, the right wing halved. Looking for signs in every kind of living. Think back to October: estrogen, the small piece of copper, and then the rain, sideways, as we ran home from the bar, the men moving like planets around us. You have been to Florida and back. Out on the patio, your gloved hands are reaching for every small green weed, your bare back against the sun.

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Jackie Delaney is a writer and editor based in Massachusetts. Her work has been published in Dream Pop, Deluge, and Audeamus.

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Faith Ellington

Downsizing

Blue wheelbarrow belly thick with ice

Layers of photographs frozen warped

Stacked all but invisible under translucent

Ice except for one. Recto: gangrenous corpse

Middle-aged man bloated purpled

At least 72 hours gone, burned by a son

With a penchant for arson and patricide

I think. My father can’t remember anymore

All the polaroids in evidence old case photos

Blown up and printed on poster board for

Courtroom sessions. He either clinched a prosecution

Or didn’t. So many years, so many Commonwealth of Pennsylvania vs.

Now we are left to dispose of the evidence:

Burn, shred, freeze. Some copies are still on file

Some copies ashed in our fireplace some copies

Frozen in our wheelbarrow waiting for thaw waiting

To be congealed then dried out and scraped pulpy like

Confetti into a trash bag placed on the curb come one Monday

In spring.

Hitchhiker [Ghost]

Sit right beside me and we are hitchhiker, ghost.

State lines speed limits blur as we tip

Into Indiana, Illinois. Midwest winter glittering

Harsh under gray sun. Undereyes violet grip

The steering wheel with windchapped knuckles

& stare at the number on the house, reconciled with

+1 (309)-XXX-XXXX. Car heater dries out our mouth

There was nothing I could do to save you then, but now

We turn the radio low, we have to make a decision.

Lights on in the house can either of us feel

Justified through cracked frost on the windshield.

I used to sleep in Walmart parking lots

So I wouldn’t have to deal with this shit.

Snow sticks. Time evaporates. Winter pools at our feet.

Baseball bat / slashed tires / crowbar / bloody knuckles /revenge fantasy

House door opens & outside of us he smokes under the porchlight

We sit side by side & stare at the end of the story

We know: turn the car around & go home.

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Faith Ellington is a PhD candidate at Louisiana State University.

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Cynthia Knorr

Shipwreck

Two tourists on a Navaho reservation

drive down a goat path to shoot the big rock,

called Shiprock (or Tsé Bit’ a’í by the natives,

a name the tourists didn’t know then

and don’t know now). This white couple

in a rental car, back seat filled with cameras

on Navaho land so stark, so spiritual, so

far from town. That big gorgeous rock looms.

They drive closer although the ruts send a message

to turn back if they could only hear it—

so many messages they’ve missed like the raven

on the fence post that stares, just stares.

Entitled and naive, a combination that waltzes

through rattlesnake country in bare feet.

A little research would have told them

they shouldn’t drive through someone’s church.

No surprise then when out of nowhere four guys in an old Cadillac convertible

cradling rifles, way past a friendly warning,

circle like a wolfpack eager to toy with two

trapped rabbits too far from their warren, rabbits

whose twitching muscles and darting eyes

acknowledge they are going to lose something here.

If they’re lucky. Everything if they’re not.

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Cynthia Knorr is the author of A Vessel of Furious Resolve (Finishing Line Press). Her poems have appeared in SWWIM Every Day, Café Review, Healing Muse, The Comstock Review, Chiron Review, and many others. After a career as a medical writer in New York City, she relocated to Strafford, New Hampshire.

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