You call from the city of your passing, the city of our birth, with news of common souls. Sending gifts I never dare to open. My hand me-down sister who lived for only a month, just enough time to make a woman. Favoring our mother the way I wear our father’s genes. You […]
Poetry 103
Emily Butler: Object permanence
These new phones are slim, breakable. Smooth as still water. I crave plastic on plastic, wrapping stiff cord around my finger like a curl of hair, flirtatiously, though I felt invisible back then on my parents’ porch steps, as far as the cord would take me. These days I could use something to clutch, something […]
Emily Butler: Christening
On the day of my brother’s christening there was a fire at the horse barn down the street. In the box of photographs, among images of my parents smiling in wide-rimmed glasses, holding the mass of my brother shrouded in white, there is a photograph of a horse, running against a backdrop of flames. […]