The Widow The house was too large for a widow so we pulled it out from under her before she could protest or understand just how complicated her attachment may be to five bedrooms filled with dead men's clothes, quiet resolutions, dust motes. When we emptied it out, secrets kept showing up in strange places. Dirty spoons in a dresser drawer, bullets under the mattress, dried blood on the outside of a second story window. No one wanted to know these things, no one wanted to dig deeper. I was surprised to find the widow was sleeping in my abandoned bed, under a glossy poster of Eminem, next to a nightstand filled with rows of foil wrapped condoms, all long expired. Like she was reliving her youth, or maybe she just needed these constant reminders when she questioned her loneliness. Shit, I sigh halfheartedly, pulling photographs from a shoebox, There's nowhere to go with all this stuff. It's all stained nicotine yellow and reeks of the grave. I fill little more than my pockets, leave the rest for her to scavenge like a raven pulling shiny buttons from the coat of a corpse. My home is bare, I have no trouble throwing anything away. The kid's preschool art, old news and still wrapped presents never given. When I die, my life will be represented by little more than the essentials. Here lived a human. She ate, she breathed, slept the required minimum, never gave anyone no problems. - Juice WRLD 2019 a backseat of bad luck teens a long ride to philly on a school night we set them free on the lawn and huddle in the parent’s pavilion bored, stoned on cell phones while our boys crowd the strobed starry eyed fame of a world-worn spirit reciting poetry like times tables to chalk boards, blacktop and board games burning to ashes under the neon crush of so many immaculate sneakers, so young but already falling away from us and didn’t you know how that felt years ago? cobain and hendrix in your headphones, beyond the veil and still stringing the kids of the future into the wide-eyed idolatry of self-annihilation? couldn’t you almost taste it, summer and stardust, the swift cold rush of interstellar blackness where ghosts roam as it rose up to meet you? Erin Cisney is a poet from Lancaster, PA who’s work has appeared in such places as Spry Literary Journal, rust & moth, and Déraciné, among others. Her poetry collection, Anatomy Museum, is available from Unsolicited Press. Twitter: @erin_cisney
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