Nighttime Ischemic
By Jennifer A Sutherland
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
Twilight, and I hear her voice, familiar kettle-hiss. Quiet, girl, she commands; then my childhood rooms are here, each one dark as pitch, bulls-eyed, red- end cigaretted. In the center Mother sits, seething. Labyrinthine lady fulcrum : rattle preening. Tiny importuning click/ click/click of gas as she warms the morning’s coffee, aluminum saucepan tap and pour. Snap of air trapped inside her. Cricket clatter. The house, its grid of trenches, of gangrene and defilade, unacknowledged. Rainbow-sheen halo of puff and smoke, her whisper-drab devotional, her pieta. Membrane contracting, clutching fibrous wall and sinew. Lung, spasming and black, immobile, wheeze and block. I must have frailed her, asked too much of her thin-stretched décolletage, engendered a reaction. When she died the aperture swelled to many times its anxious size.
Jennifer A Sutherland is the author of Bullet Points: A Lyric, from River River Books, a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Medal Provocateur and Foreword Indies Poetry Book of the Year. Her work has appeared or will soon appear in Birmingham Poetry Review, EPOCH, Hopkins Review, Best New Poets, Denver Quarterly, and elsewhere. She earned her MFA at Hollins University and she lives and works in Baltimore.
11/7 / Poetry Reading and Conversation with visiting poet-in-residence Vandana Khanna + local writer Nicole Callihan / The Gallery at The Betsy-South Beach, Miami Beach, FL / Live and Live-Streamed on Instagram Live/Facebook Live at @swwimmiami / 7-8:30 pm EST / Free
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