New Poetry for Bad Survivalist: “when i say i still think of you in august” by Cate Latimer

i mean that when i saw that truck full of chickens on highway 5, feathers grazing yellow lines, i wished on their mangled bodies and white wings pinned like fallen gods to the road. you taught me to do that. you, who left streaks of lipstick on my dashboard and playing cards in my center console and i think if you were sitting next to me again, i’d take those spades from the deck and start digging a new plot of land for the both of us to grow from. and i’d be there washing your clothes just so i could hang our colors up, mixed together on a clothesline until the sun tells us to look away while he’s working. i thought it was august yesterday. i thought you might like to know. because that summer air crept through the kitchen tiles while the kettle was screaming to be poured into a mug of that earthy earl grey that you love. because the coins you picked up off the street finally found their way from the couch cushions into my pocket and i could hear them jangling as i stripped the window of its curtain and waited for the shadow of roadkill.

Cate Latimer is a poet from Portland, Oregon. She is a first-year at Brown University studying English and Urban Studies. Her work is forthcoming in Jet Fuel Review and Amethyst Review.

Image: filipinojournal.com

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