Go use a pen at the courthouse. Hope it still registers ink and sign on the dotted line, if you’re willing, and he aint’ nothing but a man, and you nothing but a woman, and the creek don’t rise. Pencil the date on the calendar where it can fade to gray. Spend weekends touring little tin-roofed houses until you find one for your John Hancock. Subscribe it with babies and trouble rabble. Let him autograph your face. Writ the heart. Mark the rafters with lists of needful things. Unpaid bills won’t warrant you, only the law, keep forging until you have to say uncle. His uncle. And he’s out on parole. Might be ready to sing. The cipher left on a front window tells you so. Now is the time to advertise for a posse. Write to every blessed soul. Find the willing and hope the sun don’t set. Wishful, and that creek don’t rise.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 17, Issue 3.
Catherine Moore’s work has or will appear in Tahoma Literary Review, Southeast Review, Southampton Review, Blue Fifth Review, and in anthologies most recently by Pankhearst Press. She is the winner of the Southeast Review’s 2014 Gearhart poetry prize and has a chapbook “Story” published by Finishing Line Press. Catherine holds an MFA from the University of Tampa. She is tweetable @CatPoetic.
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