Poetry by Emily Wray

     Roanish CC




prom queen


i cut the tip of my pointer finger on a soda can with a ripped-off pop tab. it’s thin, looks ketchup-red down here. if it was you bleeding in the basement, throat slit like this is an agatha christie novel, you’d be condiment-red too. and what if it was just us here, you sputtering like a model t, me a sandhill crane with duct tape wings. so you know me as a ground-dweller— just wait ‘til i’m up again. how do you get the girl? you had asked me. so make this like the movies. check “yes” or “no.” pelt her windows with pebbles like an aquarium filter with an ax to grind.

we all left our shoes upstairs and everyone’s shuffling their feet, pretending to dance like lovers, but never so close that your heart starts racing. there’s so much static we’ve created a new ozone layer, and it reeks of axe apollo and desperation. i’m washing my finger in the bar sink— i’d be a whore if you saw me suck it— and there’s a couple wriggling around the corner by the washer-dryer set like i’m not even here. and there you are, jason with glauce, making your rounds. go home and sleep it off, you said, feeling my forehead for fever. but i did not. i walked around your neighborhood, shoes in my hand, crying and looking for planets. And when i stopped, i wiped my nose with my sleeve and willed myself to slip into a drainage grate, humming a requiem for the girl I loved in second grade, happy and gilden and loved.




Emily Wray (she/her) is an alumna of Purdue University's undergraduate Creative Writing program. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Bell Tower, Batch, and PATTERN.

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