In the gabled room of your uncle’s house,
I left you sleeping, left you
before your alarm could sound, before
the white gravy could thicken in the pot
and went side-stepping through the linens
hanging like a history of honeysuckle.
Beyond the screen-porch, beyond
the indifference of dirt, I returned
to the rows of white boxes—a mini mill
town of clapboard houses thrumming.
I made a fist and shoved it in my mouth
to shape a scream. I made a fist
and shoved it in my stomach to shape.
The night before, you laid me down
in the wheated ryegrass, in the heavy heat
of Carolina. I think you wanted to show me
something undeniable, that slow expansion,
the humble roar of instancy.
And between the boxes,
each for different reasons, we added
to the whipping of a thousand wings.
Jessica Dionne is a PhD student at GSU and the production editor of New South. She received her MFA from NC State and MA from UNCC. Her chapbook, Second-Hand Love Stories, is forthcoming from Fjords Press. She was the runner-up in Meridian‘s 2021 Editors’ Prize and a finalist in Passages North‘s 2021 Elinor Benedict Poetry Prize, Arts and Letters’ 2020 Poetry Prize, and Narrative‘s 2019 30 Below contest. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Hunger Mountain, Raleigh Review, SWWIM, Rust + Moth, Banshee (IE), and Mascara Literary Review (AU).
