When It’s A Sign

I sprained my finger opening a bottle of tequila. It was a new bottle, and the cork was stubborn.

Still, maybe it’s a sign.

I woke in a hospital room surrounded by machines, invaded by tubes. My mind then became a spliced wire,
making more than one version of everything. I almost died, they told me, when I nerved to complain. Three times, they boasted.

A year later, I’m not convinced I didn’t.

**Maybe it’s a sign.

A completely familiar stranger lives in my dreams, sealed in my subconscious like a barnacle on the slick underbelly of a whale. With mood ring eyes, they’re a perfectly cold, deliciously sweet creamsicle incursion.
I now sleep wide awake, aware everything has a texture.

**Maybe it’s a sign.

The stars stalk me, infinite faces from a crowded nightclub whispering, a coax to come play, a coyote baiting a dog. I’m enchanted by their offer, a chance for real fun, to laugh and dance until their teeth open my neck.
My mother’s earliest warning reminds me. I gather my things and walk away.

**Maybe it’s a sign.

My laughing in-law taps a hateful tune on the ivory keys of my back. My husband’s eyes don’t so much as shift. In my life, I become a floating apparition with see-through skin, no longer certain my hands are real. 

**Maybe it’s a sign.

The back of my head burns hot like the tail of a launched rocket. An antecedent end of times hellfire. A gender-withering flower left on a planet with so little drinkable water. I ask my doctor, There must be something?

Their answer sinks behind the shadow of a noncommittal shrug.

**Maybe it’s a sign.

It is only a matter of time before we’re gone, the news says, voicing support for my fire-breathing skull. Or, better, I imagine, pets smiling absently through the walls of our glass cages.

Time is suddenly, impossibly compressed.

I read. And wait. And listen.

Not a gasp escapes from the mouth of our collective soul. The echo of the silence shatters my tears.

**Maybe it’s a sign.  

Going Home

We’re here,
Kimmel says from the backseat, a block before our turn.
Take the left into the stars.
And we do. 

Driving recklessly into a galaxy void of sound, where silence gives way,
gives birth
to
the opposite of absence. 

From the embrace of an echo, a heart thumps in the center of a black night. Glowing in the suffusing fumes of our ether, a melon-orange flame flicks its tail in the windowsill of my memory.

Then,
all at once, from nowhere, rises
an apparition.
Gone but for the refuse of her bones and flesh, incarnated whole by this body of night, she steps fearlessly onto our front porch
into winter’s icy clutch,
and
with the promise of warmth,
brings us home. 

Summer Heat

Green grass tips are burnt a crisp yellow like my best friend’s hair back in the 80s when we were
young and full of concerts and beer,
and cigarettes and fat midnight moons. 

The ground, now a tinder box garden, sun-baked twigs and air-dried leaves crunch like cornflakes beneath the bare bottoms of our traveler’s feet.

A hot winter coat hangs over our shoulders. Salty sugar drips, leaky like a faucet, from the bridges of our noses, punctuating the pads of our honey-balm lips with tiny puddles.

From a sliver of space between the sun-speckled trees, your eyes meet mine, green-gray pools for frogs and silver-sided fish.

You smile, in the middle of nowhere, at me, like a candle in the August afternoon. I think, then, with one careful foot on the mountain, We are not yet done.

Our hike,
the heat of our summer,
has only begun.

Author’s Biography

VA lives outside Seattle, WA, with her human and animal family. Her work has appeared in The Lake, 34th Parallel Magazine, Sad Girls Literary Magazine, Ignatian Literary Magazine, OJA & L Magazine, Front Porch Review, Five on the Fifth, Lumina Journal, and Panoplyzine Magazine as the Editors’ Poem of Choice, The Basilisk Tree, and Figwort. She has work forthcoming in Crab Creek Review and Spry Literary Magazine. You can find her on Instagram at @vawiswell and www.vawiswell.com.