Personal Missive
Every day I keep an eye to eternity helped along by the neighbor’s
dog vigorously scratching his rear against the fence—ardently after
something elusive and still faithful to the hope the need might soon
be met. January. Swollen leaf bags split open by damp and rain, nests
in trees bared now to heaven, all the tender bone once woven inside
scattered on gravel, gone. This morning I properly folded my grave
clothes once again in the neat compact way my mother taught me,
then sat down to scrawl this little personal note to you who surely
must exist and sometimes pluck odd hairs off your chin in bright
sunlit bathrooms, later pausing against the kitchen counter with the
surprisingly light heft of an avocado pit in your palm, considering.
Hobby
She woke and washed her face
and went out sober to the fields
and it was morning and she was
seeking God, though she was too
abashed to say it, even to the damp
grasses and drowsing fencepost.
For awhile now she had been at
the curious hobby of cutting up
her body into little pieces on the
ground, then stomping and spitting
on them, borrowing her muddied
feet and lips to stomp and scoff
before hurriedly flinging herself
back together and retying her apron
so she could be there standing
at the kitchen sink as the sun rose.
Exhausting. But she kept at it until
wolves started congregating at the
edge of the alder trees, a bolder and
bolder congregation which finally
seized a leg and eye in its slobbering
jaws as it ran off laughing. After
all the hairy thieves had disappeared,
one of her punctured lungs began to
bleat—bleating-lamb-lung—wailing
baby in the thicket until along came—no one.
No gold handsome beauteous angel.
That story is shit. Nothing happened.
Except clover scenting her bruised heel.
The faint but stubborn thought that
there might be another way.
Jenn Blair is from Yakima, WA. She has published in Copper Nickel, the James Dickey Review, Segue, Tulane Review, and Pembroke magazine among others. Her chapbook 'The Sheep Stealer' is forthcoming from Hyacinth Girl Press.