This is heavy on pop music and sugar cereal. This is in response to the time there was a bomb in your own house. This is feeling and dirty dishes piled up like an accident on I-495. The empty Beltway still curves in the sunlight and sleeps in the wind. This is what I consumed in one day or was it two? No order. This is the children awake at midnight. This is light on papercuts and cold cuts. We’re all vegetarians soon. I lived that way, hermitage, for years. Don’t look at me. Don’t cough into the air so that your message travels into other bodies. This is time like a parasite lashing out all over the place. What keeps us, really surrounds us, is the fear. This is fear, heavy and light, placed against our throats close to where we hesitate to open our mouths.
Sarah Lilius is the author of five chapbooks, including GIRL (dancing girl press 2017) and Traffic Girl (Ghost City Press 2020). A Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, her poetry appears or is forthcoming in Massachusetts Review, New South, Boulevard, Fourteen Hills, and elsewhere. Her website can be found at sarahlilius.com.
Image: “Down Douglas” by Daniel Nester
Pine Hills Review 