POETRY

One possible implication

By Sarah Edwards     VOLUME 52.4

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Used to be they slunk out, unknowable familiars
          driven mad by heat
          like worms after rain
losing themselves
          across creek beds and driveways,
beside the paper rasp of dying
          crepe myrtles and monarchs.
          Fifteen feet long after a fat August
And sun-drunk, tumbling down barn rafters.
          They were inconsolable.
                     How I loved that old assurance,
knowing what it was that I was afraid of
and the slender form it would take
          surfacing suddenly
          & harmlessly, flicking snake-fear
into quick life
and quickly after, repose. How I hated them,
          how I expected them,
          how little I knew they wanted from me.

 






SARAH EDWARDS is a writer and editor in Durham, North Carolina. Her work appears in, or is forthcoming in, Subtropics, Ninth Letter, the Sycamore Review, the Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, T Y P O, Prelude, and the Oxford American.


VOLUME 52.4