Spring 2022, Volume 32

Poetry by Anna Weber

Shadow Boxes

i.
Your daughter has the nightmare again,
the one where her dolls come to life.  She asks
to sleep in your room, your bed, your body
absorbing hers.  It’s a kind of muscle memory. 
You used to live here, you whisper.

ii.
Once, on a childhood camping trip,
you watched a boy smash
a butterfly to dust with a stone.
Another little girl said you
were going to hell because
you hadn’t accepted Jesus
as your lord and savior.

iii.
Your son is three.  He is a cat
every day, meows at you in fits
of rage when you cannot find
the right marble in his toy box of debris.
He throws a shoe at you and you
worry he might shoot up his high school. 
Hours later, he crawls back to your lap
and meows a gentle meow of contrition.
You’re sorry too, for thinking
the thoughts you think.

iv. 
Your actual cat disappeared
months ago.  In dreams,
she is disappointed with you.
Did you ever find my body? she asks.
Did you even look?   Her tail hangs
by a thread.  You wake sweaty
and crying and wonder
if this is how menopause starts.
You worry you might be pregnant.

v.
She has shoved them all into her closet—
the dolls.  Months later, the nightmare
lingers, a rotten taste on the tongue. 
She says at night they talk to her. 
They sing songs.  She asks if she can
give them away, but they were
so expensive.  And anyway, what songs
do they sing? What do they tell you
in the dark? 

 

When the snow came

you were drunk with the idea
of what it means to live free. 
You were drunk with the idea
of unfettered passion. You were
drunk.  It fell to the earth
in spiraling globules like saliva swung
in the warmer months from
a dog’s mouth, all spittle and froth. 
A wet, sloppy love letter.  Summer
felt suddenly very far away, illustrations
from a storybook someone read to you
when you were a child, or an anecdote
told at a party after you’d had too many
glasses of white wine.  That brain hurt
of trying to focus a thing back into place. 
But: only the day before, temps had been
in the eighties.  Tornado sirens had wailed. 
Nothing about the world felt nuanced anymore. 
A person you were with— a spouse or a child
or a lover—said we should probably go to the basement. 
Take shelter.  But no one moved and
eventually the sirens slowed, quieted,
then stopped altogether, a train chugging on
to the next town and the town after that. 
Realize you’ve always known this: you only have
to wait it out and everything changes.  Nothing
can remain.  Even the snow, now covering
suburban hedges; muted winter grass; lawn chairs
sprawled across backyards like animal skeletons,
ossified cartilage of beasts long dead—
it too will melt.  In a day or a week or a month,
the sun will show back up like an ex-boyfriend. 
Determined to remind you what it is to feel
illicit warmth and longing.  What it is to terribly urge. 
And then it will disappear again.  Some things exist
only to turn life to beautiful ruin.  Harsh, gleaming bones. 
Tilt your face to it before it goes.  The burn
is a choice to be made: embrace.  Or, endure. 

 

 

 

BIO: Originally from Louisiana, Anna Weber currently lives in Huntsville, Alabama, where she teaches creative writing at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. Her work has recently appeared in Nimrod, the Blue Earth Review, Tar River Poetry, the South Carolina Review, Catamaran, the Fiddlehead, and Flock, among other journals. ​