Sarah Ellis

Drought season

The sky was smiling, smug-mouthed
and unspeakable, so I took
the long way home. Stepped on sewer grates,
kicked license plates, traversed places
I no longer recognized
the people or dogs walking them.
And what I wouldn’t give
to be steeling myself
for the bees who blow through
the front yard like they own it
and maybe they do
and it’s me who’s intruding,
electric mower in sun-speckled hands
that should be taken back down cellar,
to leave the bees in peace.
What I would give
to never again go inside.
To delay my metaphor, pride pounding on the plywood
plating the once kicked-in basement door
depleting me of grass-stained dreams,
splintering the suspension of reality
repelled by concrete and the leash of liminality.
This is the end of the mattering, the end
of sweet water and ash at my feet—
so yeah. I took the long way home.

Sarah Ellis is a chemist and graduate of Reed College who lives and writes in Massachusetts. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Poet Lore, Ranger Magazine, and Oyster River Pages, among others.