HELEN SPICA

Remains

People I know have been dropping

like flies. Though, I found that flies

don’t drop so easily,

summer with my legs all welts,

all terrible mountain,

slapslap their wings too quick

for me, they filled the parts

I forgot, behind our ears,

our low, thin backs, ready to slide

into something more delightful.

Dropping like flies, or maybe

like moths, who spent their lives

against the kitchen window,

fighting that invisible skin kept them there,

away from the watery light,

and in the morning we’d find them

exhausted on the ground with

wings spread like rotten bark

or plywood, cheap and splintering,

never meant to hold,

and this I want to remember

because, on this morning,

born to us from nowhere,

everything sticks together, the papers

on the doorsteps and our hands on the handles,

our breath only just becoming

glass on our delta tongues,

and the fog spills out from us

like Argentina,

like Namibia, and now

someone has buried

her children below us, before she

drops and is swept from the sidewalk,

and in their small and gummy bodies

they sleep and turn, wait.

Helen Spica, a native of the Midwest, writes poetry and short fiction. Her poems have been featured in publications including Midwestern Gothic, Pure Francis, Sundog Lit, and The Stylus of Boston College. Her work is also forthcoming in Two Hawks Quarterly. She lives in Boston.