She put her womb in our old valise. Brown leather, buckles and straps. Shoved it in a corner of the pump house, said she didn’t need that worry when there was all the rest. I knew it wasn’t the worry but the weight, how it grew heavier each year, filling with portend, regret. At times it hummed, a droning flute. When she wanted to throw it down the well, I took it away. Seven miles and into the bog, past the school, past the cemetery. I planted it under a giant cypress. Told no one. She never asked after it. I don’t know exactly when women started visiting—tying ribbons, setting little dolls or scrolls of words among the roots. They sing. Those who come alone may bring a small bag. They leave empty-handed. No music then.
—Published previously in Phantom Drift: A Journal of New Fabulism
(seventh annual issue, October 2017); appears here with author’s permission
lives and writes in Michigan. Her work has been nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize and has been published in
KYSO Flash, New Flash Fiction Review, Rattle, Rhino, Slipstream, Smartish Pace, The Atlanta Review, The MacGuffin, and
The Notre Dame Review, among others. Her work has also been anthologized in several venues, including
Nasty Women Poets: An Unapologetic Anthology of Subversive Verse (Lost Horse Press),
in plein air: poems and drawings of the natural world (Poetic Licence Press),
The Cento: A Collection of Collage Poems, and
The Dire Elegies: 59 Poets on Endangered Species. She is the author of two chapbooks,
tesla’s daughter (March St. Press) and
Walking Back the Cat (Bright Hill Press), and a full-length collection of poems,
Light That Sounds Like Breaking (Mayapple Press).
