SPELL FOR ELSEWHERE
An angry bleat urges me to fasten the seatbelt, metronomic click
of the blinker punctuating its screech-song. The windows are down
& the rain drips onto my thighs. It brings me back to the body
in spatters. On the highway, I let three people merge & not one
waves. I am out of wiper fluid again & get lost on Ward Parkway.
A different me is silhouetted in the lit windows of every house I drive
past – me: reading a book, me: making dinner, me: alone staring back.
A. N. DEJESÚS is a proud second-generation Dominican-American poet and technical writer working out of Kansas City, Missouri. Her poems appear in the Los Angeles Review, Permafrost, Bear Review, Cider Press, Luna Luna Magazine, and the Best of the Net Anthology (2019), among others. She has recently earned a Master of Arts in English Literature and Rhetoric from the University of Missouri-Kansas City. She was the recipient of the Helen and Emily Nguyen Creative Award and attended a fellowship at Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing.
Read more by A. N. DeJesús
Author’s Website
Poem at The Growler (audio)
On Twitter at @amand_nah