Let’s see if anyone’s home,
I’d tell my daughter as we flipped
rocks, rolled logs aside, the mixture
of earth and mystery before our eyes
but never faces, at best slithery backs
and legs hightailing it, seeking under
or out of—just away from this invasive
disruption of eternity, the blood-roots
of their night garden riled by the swirl
of survival’s flight, our rabid innocence
that broken hand of life caught between
cracked limbs and sky fanning the flames
as their villages crashed, brood and elders
fragiled in egg sacks or shells like children
aware for the first time of fog saying heaven,
mosquito about things entwined or the dog
that studies the wind with both ears erect,
not howling as God revised the rat a quick
million times before it would bite our fingers
to the bone—a pin-scream of ether between
worlds emerging as I remember the night
our own house was flipped, ravaged from
within and out, exposed to the harshest
of winds and flames and yet we held on,
to each other, our faces, and somehow
managed to find our way home.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 26, Issue 2.
Matt Dennison is the author of Kind Surgery, from Urtica Press (Fr.) and Waiting for Better, from Main Street Rag Press. His poetry has appeared in Verse Daily, Rattle, Bayou Magazine, Redivider, and Cider Press Review, among others. His fiction has appeared in ShortStory Substack, THEMA, GUD, The Blue Crow (Aus), Prole (UK), The Wondrous Real, and is forthcoming in Story Unlikely.
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