Jessica Purdy

In late summer the shop in
my heart shuts down

I’m not there to take the juicy pieces and throw them to the sharks. The signs at the Head of the Meadow beach say Be Shark Smart and Severe Bleeding First Aid. Seal heads pop up black and humanoid from the waves. This year the ocean hits the shore crossways as if the axis of the earth sustained injury. I don’t even go in. Nobody knows me, I tell my daughter and her friends. What is a friend unless you know what they do for fun? How can you give them presents or parts of your body to them. Share a cold drink and suck from the same straw. Divide your life in half, I said to no one. How does that feel? What if you kept hearing the same song you never liked as your body works at dying? The same instance over and over folded and tucked into an envelope. We can’t leave you with all this stuff, my mother says. Looking down the shorter end of a long life. I’m not ready for the rest of this. In time I might come back to life. Numb toes might tingle and blood suffuse my fingertips. Firestart a song, inhabit the dream. Really sell myself again.

Jessica Purdy holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Emerson College. Her poems have appeared in Gone Lawn, Radar, One Art, The Night Heron Barks, Gargoyle, and SurVision. Her books STARLAND and Sleep in a Strange House were both released by Nixes Mate in 2017 and 2018. Her two recent chapbooks are: The Adorable Knife poems based on The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death (Grey Book Press), and You’re Never the Same: Ekphrastic Poems (Seven Kitchens Press).