Kisa wrapped her scarf around herself and folded her knees up against the window. The daytime roared outside like an endless fire, but the lights were coming soon. The black lights.

I forgot how to take off my shoes /
How do normal people /
Take off their shoes /

Every Tuesday they saunter up next to our chicken coop, mustaches twitching in unison, and blast the house full of holes. They always seem surprised when no bodies are there to pile in a heap in the yard because we knew they were coming and are down by the river. Pisses the chickens off to no end, of course.

The day that Maisy stopped believing in God, she began seeing the skeletons.

Marilka went on so many walks her arms disappeared /
regressing inside her clavicle like two large ropes /

It's the loudest on windy days. In the spring, when the temperatures swing in Nebraska from 34 to 80 in a day, the wind gusts roar up 50 mph. On those days, the fan squeals like a newborn tyrannosaurus rex. 

The wind prowled the world, restless, until it skulked through a maple grove on a hill and its memory returned.

Aloe waited in the mailbox, shivering in the February freeze along with his three foster siblings, Cactus, Snake Plant, and Jade.

The door opens like tree boughs reaching for /
the sun, and you’re sure /
you didn’t move, but the floor moves you inside /
like wind buoying a bird through its branches /

When will they regard the autonomy of a woman’s hard /
decision with the same religion of just looking up /
with the same faith and leaping to conclusions /
That they do to us?

In the autumn, we trek /
Into the Red Grove /
Where the little fox-fires grow /

The face in the window /
Much like a small moon /
Pitted and reflecting /
The light from my lamp /

Dawn pressed his lips to the horizon and Sky blushed like a schoolgirl. All pink and pastel, she twirled her birds up into the winds.

Panic Attack: WAKE UP THERE’S A BEAR

Me: what no there’s not

Panic Attack: BEARS EVERYWHERE

A swarm of moths, not butterflies—not yellow sunny-sweet nerves, but a gray chill of disquiet—swarmed through her.

They named me Diana /
they vilify me on their news reports /
they say that I’m insane, a category five /

Every day, Niska climbed the rope ladder into the harbor of the sky to watch the cloud boats sail.

The constellation wrapping her torso—Tapez, the Winged Warrioress—flared crisp and bright through her clothes in the darkness of the late evening.

Something prehistoric, a vast predatory thing, it poses as a tree with root-like talons, and feathers that pass as leaves.

Success looks like crying at night /
when you’ve overcome the ticking /
of the clock, ever listing what it wants /