By Carol Matos
Watching a fawn arch its spine
and track its parents’ prints in near darkness,
a woman exaggerates her memories,
the cruelties that invade her sleep—
dark-blooded men throwing her
out of the sky, and she falls fast in the unreal,
the downward landscape revolving.
In the mornings, she rebels against fear
and picks squash blossoms from her garden.
She prefers lilies, but cats die after ingesting them.
Now she waits deep in the flux
of remaking herself on her unlit porch,
and like a pup coyote practicing a howl,
she vocalizes, I will close the gap
between truth and provable.
Startled by her cat’s leap
from the porch railing, she finds
purpose in the paw he licks clean,
in the lines separating each claw as dusk
reaches them and their fading edges disappear.