From My Notes
or
The Purging
When my back skin is dry
I can pull it tight
to scratch the itch
She put post-its
on her cell phone
The home we live in
has been handed down
from one social class to the next
A man runs into his ex-wife
and tells her how the woman
that he left her for
broke his heart
She didn’t want to feel sorry for him
but she did
The boy who lived by the highway
mimicked his mother’s pressed flower collection
by keeping a book of pressed roadkill
And the New Year hissed goodbye
And there was a teenage baptism
in a storefront church
where kids stole sodas from the back refrigerator
before they entered the family of God
During the great pandemic
the abandoned aquariums
became blood baths
as the caretakers died
and the once well-fed aquatic beasts
were driven to survival
in fake habitats
And the Earth’s gray bled
into the storm laden sky
and the horizon disappeared
smearing gray
everywhere
and no one was there
to clean it up
Stink Eye Magazine 