There’s a flash of her car headlights for a beat
brimming over the edges & seeping across my whole field of vision-
Pervasively white, a blinding glint on the water when the sun hits exactly wrong
ink against the sky, where the organized geometry of stars
is watching with eyes clothed over in a mesh
Tires run me over,
shuttered bruisèd kissed bloom
The color of a dropped apple where each tread came down too hard
A cut from neck to navel
peels me open like a husk of corn,
hangs me out to dry under the hurried threat of being caught by winter-
Alternatively, the cicadas & crickets & grasshoppers
& katydids & wasps & bees & cicada killers
& ants & mites & gnats
& flies & hornets & yellowjackets
Are crawling all about inside and outside, pricking, droning,
Holding in position only by force of will-
Petrichore
The moon, and shallots cut in thin circles
revealing their arborous layers
sit in the window sill.
Seeing them is subtly startling,
evocative of recognition that the scent of smoke still clings to my clothes,
& also that I haven’t willed myself to close the glass door
outside which
I am still watching.
The City High Review 