“A Word Like Chaos”
makes me crave mornings
when the air between us is damp and heady
with the sound of destruction:
rip of bright leaves off vines
still ripe with life,
crack of egg on the stovetop,
translucent gel sticky
on fingertips,
burst of axe into woodpile over
and over again
until
i kiss the place between your shoulders
where scapulae meet like flickering
butterfly wings,
and the muscle there strains.
it’s simple,
i want your hands
to give me the same courtesy
of ruination.
but before the dead leaf browns,
and crunches under foot,
use those hands
to press together the cracks
in our upstairs window,
so when we sleep
our breath is not hard with ice,
so when we wake
our foggy minds are safe
from winter winds.
this is important.
there are some things
i cannot bear to see break.
“To the Clay Angel Statue with Silver Polka Dot Butterfly Wings”
You must be an illusion
of everything ancient in this world
and everything we have
forgotten in it.
I may not believe in god,
but I believe in you.
Reaching upward,
your hands are cracked,
as they should be.
Broken hands.
Hands that ripped
vines under the California
sun to make wine.
Hands that stirred paint
in plastic milk jugs
to get just the right shade of azul.
Hands that fingerprinted
the edges of a canvas,
the walls of a cave,
the vein in the middle
of a woman’s forehead.
The silver-tipped wings
remind me of the way streetlights
look with tears in eyes.
They are silver and felt, the way
sand feels against toes
in a moving river,
the way his voice smells
after he’s pressed a brass trumpet
to his lips and buzzed, making
jazz like making love.
There is something honest
in this dollar store cabinet ornament,
something fragile that might
shatter under a whisper.
This is faith:
the holding of breath to preserve
what is glinting and red,
delicately carved
and quickly superglued
together like a promise:
You will be saved.
You already are.
“You Are the Last Train”
for the night out of Brooklyn,
sour with the ripe reek of strangers
too close under fluorescent lights, too far
from the heartbeats calling them home,
fluttering under the weight of nothing,
the burden of missing.
You are the cricket,
just the one,
at the station in the garbage can,
mistaken shelter, warm and rotting,
a haven of tomato soup, full diapers,
sandwich crusts, and loose nails.
Here, dreams fall in watercolor leaves
and strips of rain.
Can you feel me
like a tornado against
the empty Oklahoma sky,
lightning silent against the stars,
the briefest kiss of a vortex lifting the baby
hairs on your cheeks?
Tonight there is the barest moon.
No good, just night.
No night, just good,
a sandman with a pouch
of serpent teeth.
This is what it’s like to live
where you are not.
Where you are whistling and my ears
are burning because I know
it’s about me.
Where you are empty like a mason jar,
and I hold all the fireflies, torn grass,
and dirt clods in my palm.
Where I smell, instead of the sweat
of your hair as you dream next to me,
the sharp brass of your suitcase clasps
as they snap closed. Again.
You are something borrowed,
stolen from another life
with crickets and skylines as blue
as the glow from the abandoned laptop
in the quiet corner of this cobweb,
honey-slow life we have made.
Isabella Barricklow is an English major at Central Michigan University. She is a 2019 Fulbright English Teaching Award nominee for Colombia. She spends her spare time speaking Spanish, traveling, hiking, and writing about all of it. Her work has appeared in The Blue Route, Red Cedar Review, The Slag Review, Audeamus, Central Review, and 30N.