POETRY

By Sheila Black

The rattler your husband impaled by bringing
down his shovel, the body split in two,
those twitch­ing parts. Frost killed the butterfly
weed and the orange tree. The prickly pear
sprawled into slime, the wood splintered
into apart­ment houses for ants and potato
bugs. You, in your stained night­gown, socks
on your feet, review­ing the minor disaster
of your sink. Some­where a radio, someone
singing a funeral song, lovely and pointless
as rain. “Hell no, I won’t go,” like saying “hell”
ever stopped anyone. You ate a raw
egg with Worces­ter­shire sauce to cure
a hang­over. You were a body hungry for salt.
Water evap­o­rat­ed from the hood of a car
in Las Cruces, New Mexico, where the municipal
mon­u­ment was a village of crosses—the ones
who came and stayed without intending.
Where did they hope to get to— ineffable
bliss of sky, a sun that spills like sugar

This story orig­i­nal­ly appeared in Stonecoast Review Issue 18.

Photo by Ethan Wright-Magoon.