Poetry by Sherry Bollero

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Shedding
​
Perhaps the cat dancing on shoelaces is in love
with the length of black line across the carpet.
Back feet go tapping across the thinness
until she tumbles and rolls away, shy.
I know there are things she hates,
things she runs from or challenges
with needling little teeth and pinpoint claws.
Even then, she leaves in a cloud of hair,
a signature left mingling with the dust.
She ignores the sun inching from the room
while dropping cotton ball mementos
as she cleans, smaller versions of her
roll under the table. She fills up this space
with bits of fur and oil adoration.
I never loved being that much
to leave pieces of me carelessly.
What if she disappears, sheds all her affections
until there’s nothing left but whiskers?

​


Little Love Predictions

Wedding white lace and a band of gold are tufts of cottonwood
gone tumbling. Our children with names (of some kind)

grow indistinctly into their futures as dandelion umbrellas
twirling away toward the horizon. I’ve been squinting into the future so long
              my eyes have gone bad.

Someday I will bury you—will stand at the pulpit
forming the strangeness of your name on my lips, walk by

the waxen peace formed in your casket, think in hours of your ash
swept into an urn. I will be all that’s left of our good days. One half of a history
               standing near the casing of the other.

We will be in shapeless black among suffocating gardens
of roses and lilies, each starving slowly in the absence of necessity.

I know this clearly. I know this like my steady reflection
in glass. We are pulling pages from our book.
               I think of all the ways we could stop being.

​
​

Sherry Bollero is a doctoral student in English at the University of North Dakota (UND) where she currently teaches English composition and a course on adaptation studies. Her work has appeared in Watershed Review and The Poetry Annals' anthology The Anatomy of Desire. 

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