Faults
Amanda Wynn
the earth shifts
and I am falling
losing hope
grasping onto
crumbling cliffs
the tide washes
all the doubt
away from me
a past I won’t
hold with certainty
fire rages through
all weakness cries
from images of
who lives
and who dies
moving closer
nudging for a touch
reading faces of those
who look too hard
but see enough
shaking
everything we
knew as real
and bash them
into jagged glass
the day is shorter
yet I feel no closer
to death
then the earth shifts
_________________________________________________________________________
Katie McCleary
Thanksgiving is me, eight-years-old and standing on the kitchen chair pulled up to the countertop smooshing my hands in the makings of cold stuffing, and there is my father at my side telling me to dig deep into the croutons, chicken broth, cooked bits of sausage, onion, and celery, saying “mash it up, girl,” and so I stir until my hands are sticky with butter, scented with sage, and excited to eat the feast that will be ready in eight hours for my family of four, who will cozy at the table, each going round and round to say our thanks—me for my cat, Mopsy; my sister for her Teddy Ruxpin; my mother for our health; and my dad for all of us. In three years this family will be no more—my day will be split into two dinners—no longer will I wake up in my father’s house to make the stuffing and soon when he and I drift apart because I am a teenage girl with a grudge in her heart and he is a man with a broken one, there will be nothing to fill the turkey with—just a cavity where lungs once breathed air and a heart pumped life, and without the good stuff inside the bird dries out and soon he, my sister, and I are sitting at a round table in an apartment under a broken hanging lamp, mustering through the holiday with the meat disintegrating between our teeth, somewhere in between rubber and sawdust, making us thirsty for what we had long, long, ago.
