9/30/2021 Poetry by Linda Scheller Christian Collins CC Late Afternoon A scab has formed the color of my hair, the color of sunset on the feedlot. Crop dusters strafe the roof unfurling sheets of pesticides that sting my tongue. I look up from my phone, message half-finished like the journal I shared with Emily until she died two months before her fourteenth birthday. My mother drifts in and a cat yawns on the dirty sill. Across the road a tractor hums harrowing the field. My mother is boiling water, and through the curtain of steam her face writhes white and empty. The lid descends. She disappears down the hall again and the bedroom door clicks shut. Past the sleeping cat motorcycles roar toward the mountains. My mother reappears coughing, eyes slack, lips wet. She pushes a button and Jimi howls All along the watchtower and she says, as usual, “Don’t forget to play this at my funeral.” Outside Molly barks, Molly who saved me from the attack rooster. One scream drew orange lightning knocking him off his spurs, breaking his neck with one snap. I hated my mother’s chickens, filthy things. I’m glad the weasel came and killed them all. “Mom?” She doesn’t answer, doesn’t hear me over the music. The light from sunset tinges the kitchen red. The knife blade flashes as my mother repeatedly stabs the roast. San Joaquin River: Summer It’s one of those days when the dead surface bloated with failed ambition, glittering with lost potential. Gentle souls gravitate toward breaking glass, the scream of sirens, last gasps and so it is that we, the haunted, the naïve, stagger, later floundering in bed adrift a raft of dreams. The current must flow downstream; winds must sheer. Watch the banks for portents, the depths for clarity, the surface for suggestions. What fish lurk at the bottom, waiting? What birds ride the willow branches and nestle into quiet corners, brooding? Linda Scheller is a California Central Valley author, educator, and radio programmer whose poetry and book reviews are published or forthcoming in Terrain, Rise Up Review, Gingerbread House, The Inflectionist Review, Pif, Oddville Press, The American Journal of Poetry, and Entropy, among other publications. In 2017, FutureCycle Press published her full-length poetry collection, Fierce Light. For more information, please go to lindascheller.com. Comments are closed.
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