of Depression Era glass but haven’t mailed it yet.
The money sits in my account, breathing at me.
What I’ve done, I keep to myself, like that time
in the barn where the grain is kept, with a boy
who asked if I ever had orgasms. I’m still trying
to locate the swallow that flew into the stovepipe,
the swallowtail on pink Jupiter’s Beard, the toad
in the black plastic drainpipe. Let me relocate what I love,
tell you I’m still here in the house that burned in May 1993,
near the rosebush that hid my son’s bear for three nights.
How I withdrew with good tweezers the tick burrowed
deep in my husband’s side, laminated it in sticky tape.
Jackson Pollock was better at spatter later in the day.
I rise easily after reading BBC News in small print
on my phone. I should have been a barn owl, a cat
scratch, garden variety bat clinging to the bearded iris.
We all have our god days, or it just that we’re too lazy
to type that extra ‘o’ to make it good? Excuse me,
you accidentally left your thought window open.
See, I was not the David Bowie song. I was not
about to tell that boy no, I don’t have orgasms.
Or maybe it was just him, or the oat-y scent of feed,
mice living in empty grain bags, how the horses munched
as the boy unhooked me while my mother and aunt,
now dead, weren’t looking. For a time, I was a silent
wind-chime. A wreckage of dreams, the sheep, sheared
and skirted. I kept the moon in my pocket,
along with a poem, a small kiss, a straw of hay. It
took my mother thirty years to collect all these plastic tubs
of Buttons & Bows, of Fire King, Florentine Poppy #2.
What I couldn’t shake was the way glass shattered when fire licked
the windows of our newly built house, the tick’s tiny legs
perfectly preserved between the tape’s sticky panes.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 24, Issue 2.
Ronda Piszk Broatch is the author of Lake of Fallen Constellations, (MoonPath Press). Ronda’s current manuscript was a finalist with the Charles B. Wheeler Prize and Four Way Books Levis Prize, and she is the recipient of an Artist Trust GAP Grant. Ronda’s journal publications include Fugue, Blackbird, 2River, Sycamore Review, Missouri Review, Palette Poetry, and Public Radio KUOW’s All Things Considered. She is a graduate student working toward her MFA at Pacific Lutheran University’s Rainier Writing Workshop.
See all items about Ronda BroatchVisit Ronda Broatch’s contributor’s page.
