It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
running up, down remembering, forgetting my phone, a sweater in case when already two minutes late I pause with one foot over the threshold glance at the back door still open and take in through the shut, left-side blinds, something white, waist-high amid the ducks chipmunks squirrels stuffing in the patio’s thrown, bird food— child in white shirt bent over, feeding critters too? I dash and peer and the morning stills: A tremendous white-as-unfolded-paper rooster is eating sunflower seeds on my back porch with his florid wattle and comb bulging almost indecently full. At his feet, a rabbit keeps munching, but he spots me staring and stands up, two-and-a half-feet tall, his head going back and forth (like someone told him it should), as his yellow pencil legs and six hotdog toes staccato up and down next to our grill where we cooked his many, packaged wives before he turns and takes off in fearless strides around the hedge with his tail feathers, too fluffy for such a ravishing male, twitching back. How can I not, even in heels, open the back door further, scatter the fur there to follow? He glances back, struts past the neighbor’s purple flowers and I think, Roosters don’t fly, remember my phone in my hand while he watches and must understand because he really runs now, reaching with those crazed legs that are too cartoon to support such white weight, let him soar between bounds, or arc around the last rowhouse and out of the shade —all lit engorged red, lifted white and skinny bursting yellow— with such grace I feel we should watch roosters race instead of horses— as he leaps to the left out of sight. He was never afraid. His running was more like showing off or like he was leading me into the sun and to his last place in the wide, hot grass to stand, pondering his point while insisting and giggling on the phone that there was a huge, white, gorgeous rooster just jogging behind our houses. I knew then he was laughing back, but remembered that to appear as a white animal to only one woman is something gods used to do— that thank god his visit did not leave me knocked out and up as such visits tend to, but still it struck me as an impossible wink, meant just for me, something I had to run after, to see, before I was so late for this lunch with my sisters, the one where I whisper I am getting married tomorrow.
Hilary Varner (she/her) received her MFA in Poetry from Warren Wilson College. Her work has appeared in The Collagist, The Cortland Review, Juked, SWWIM Every Day, and elsewhere. She currently lives in Plainfield, IL, with her husband, three kids, and two cats, and can be reached at hilaryvarner@gmail.com, facebook.com/hilary.varner.9, and on Instagram @pisceanfaerie.
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I love every single centimeter of this poem, but especially this:
"that thank god his visit
did not leave me
knocked out and
up as such visits
tend to..."