You’ll tell me if I’ve gone overboard, right, if my words are peripatetic, if they don’t meet the clime of your comportment. The serviceberry leaves are turning red. Now they are gone, and the applesauce is restless on the trees. A sparrow peeks into a birdhouse on a blue pole. Her healing is stippled with camera noise and a final lemonade stand of the season. Dry corncobs hang from oak cabinets. Red feathers and a beak pant a bead of water on a leaf. Leave us alone. No. The us is too familiar, the us is me, is you, impressionable pearls of ample yesterdays, ground together into hourglass sand. I’m hungry. I want to eat all of the cherries, but I’m fresh out of sense. Unhinged, disorganized. Why don’t you stop me? I count on you to pull the weeds out of my words, to cap them, to sweep against them like the wind against another yellow autumn, to quiet them like the word perfunctory. I am a wanderer anchored to a foothill city, sirens dangling effortlessly from a nearby parkway. Bamboo leans in, touches a warped fence. Joy wails in mounds beyond a wrought-iron alleyway gate, dusk an obstacle, a rebellion. The plastic stand comes down. The sun is a trap door to the southern sky. You’ll tell me if I’ve gone overboard, won’t you? No, not that again. Have I crossed a threshold? Show me what I do not see, what Ts I should not cross. Show me the promise that your awareness holds, a shimmer. Like a starfish on an arctic coast, so colorful, like a candy necklace, little discs of pink and blue and red and purple and orange, but with arms, a rainbow of arms. Your voice is like the sand against a wave. No. Like the sound of you singing to the soft shine of your belly.

Deanna Benjamin

writes lyric memoir, poems, and micro-stories. Her creative work can be read in Brevity, The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, Flash Boulevard, The Texas Review, Waterwheel Review, and other venues.

Author’s website: https://pictures-words.com/about-us/