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Spring

by Sadie E. Forkner

 

In your memory, it rains every day of May. It tears the soft newgreen leaves from every tree in sight. On weeknights you sit up late, wait to be killed with your teeth clenched. You imagine men climbing in every open window with knives. As a fear, this does not make sense–as far as you are concerned, your chest is already carved open into a flower, each petal a slice of your lungs licked clean. Breath is a sound you make, if you remember to breathe at all. Mostly, your teeth are pressed into each other. You do not remember a time before the rain funneled from the sky in drops like small, white teeth. You long mostly for things you are sure you will never have, and on Sunday mornings, you throw open your blinds to find the sun has disappeared. The lawn is littered with dead horses, bellies encrusted with deer ticks, hooves all peel and split. The canal is swollen with rainwater, crushed cans, rusted-out shopping carts. You whisper to the sky as you drive home at noon—I am already dead or at least dying. You do not recognize the curl of your knuckle into the steering wheel, convinced you left your body back in March. It melted, like a snowdrift, into a girl’s mouth. In your memory, you spend the month shivering in and out of car doors like a ghost caught in a rainstorm. You are convinced that the horses are a poor sign for the radishes. If June comes, you swear you will loosen your hair.

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