Swallowing Sounds Like Boiling Water
I can feel a word
crawling up my esophagus
like tequila
in a red dress
or the kitchen table
that I swallowed when
my grandmother died.
I should have slipped into
the word when I married,
or when I learned to
measure coffee,
or when I first shrank
from small hands, small toes.
One day, it will become
more than a word.
It will be a song
a eulogy
a dissertation.
It will be or has been
my mother’s hands
made of flour
boiled in chicken bones,
and her smile
heavy with the weight
of the kitchen table
in her stomach.
One day,
I will be old enough
or brave enough
to speak the word,
or write it in a journal
that may be read
by my daughters.
I may finally cloak myself
in the word and allow it
to rush from my esophagus
where it is now stuck.
But for now, I let the word
“motherhood”
linger like a tickle
in my throat
or a flame
under the teakettle
of my childhood.
Farmland
On the commute home
the clouds form a table
atop four grain silos,
each grand, different.
It reminds me of you.
The top of the table is
covered with papers:
marriage certificates,
manuscripts,
dissertations.
Beneath the table
grows the pile of rejections:
unworn house slippers,
discarded candy wrappers,
an album of pictures that
doesn’t belong to us.
A box of ashes teeters
on the edge of the table.
If it falls, will our life
have happened at all?
I pass beyond sight of the table, and
I remember that it is only clouds.
I forget them as I continue home.
Elizabeth Jenike is currently a master’s student of creative writing at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, where she serves as the Fiction Editor for Oxford Magazine, the graduate literary publication. She received her undergraduate degree in creative writing from Northern Kentucky University in 2012. Her poetry appeared in the 2010-2011 edition of NKU Expressed, and her short story “The End” was published in the 2009-2010 edition of the same. Most recently, her flash fiction piece “How to Dye Window Treatments” was published by the undergraduate literary project ObsessionMag.
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