Exhalations
untethered from my daydreams
my husband says ¿Que te pasa?
¿Por que tanto suspiro?
it’s even a joke now—my fictional
characters respond to every
line of dialogue with sighs.
Like me. We’re illegible,
scrawling out the only possible
response, knee-deep in flail—
trails of guilt or worry or shame.
Today’s flavour, borrowed in bulk,
could be the baby squirrel’s failure
to thrive despite two-hour intervals
of squirrel Ensure syringed into his mouth,
or the gravity of the paralyzed kitten
white-knuckling her way
onto the couch, back legs dragging
behind like limp balloons,
a trail of urine swished across
the floor with her lifeless tail.
All of it grim. Buckling under
concrete walls of my neighbour’s
construction— the misplaced anger
or is it jealousy—
daily aimed out. I, not wanting
anymore to make this heartache
into compost, rich and mulchy;
converting inflected pain from
their daily pot shots into
medicine. Instead, I want to
molotov cocktail my clumsy pain
back at them, impaling
injustice
back at them,
firing off cannons of ill will
until we all fall.
Instead, we sip a homemade root
beer, in a contemplative quiet
punctured by deep sighs.
Lisa Lopez Smith
Lisa López Smith is a mother and farmer making her home in central Mexico. When not wrangling kids or rescue dogs or goats, you can probably find her working on her next novel. Her poems and essays have been published in over 55 literary journals and nominated for the Pushcart, Best of the Net, and Best New Poets. Her first chapbook was published by Grayson Books; her full-length collection is forthcoming from Nightwood Editions.
