Leaving Rhode Island
White coral, lightless chandeliers,
ship’s rigging etched in scrimshaw:
last night’s wet snow weighs on the trees,
keys of an old piano, stuck down and silent.
The trees along the highway after the snow
make fractured glass of the sky.
Every twig’s an upside-down éclair,
every branch a zigzag two-tone bowling alley.
Once, our glass stovetop shattered,
and every fragment stayed in place.
I wonder what’s waiting to burst
into burning circles
just on the other side of the sky.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 19, Issue 41.
Margaret C. Hughes’s poems have appeared in Foliate Oak Literary Review and Small Craft Warnings. Margaret is a queer organizer and activist, and holds a B.A. in English Literature & Creative Writing from Swarthmore College.
See all items about Margaret C. Hughes
Jenna Le, a daughter of Vietnamese refugees, is the author of two full-length poetry collections, Six Rivers (NYQ Books, 2011) and A History of the Cetacean American Diaspora (Anchor & Plume, 2016). Her poetry has appeared in AGNI Online, The Best of the Raintown Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Denver Quarterly, The Los Angeles Review, and Massachusetts Review. Her website is