If you ask me why I left Michigan, I would tell that you that it wasn’t because Of the weather which left me with a bloated album of waiting for the blackouts to skip between the trees. It wasn’t because the roofs unfurled and the doors retreated to hollows somewhere in the sky. It wasn’t because of the shelves of water, inching like new constellations across an endless night. It was the full circle of fear, the kind that stays in my mouth like neon jawbreakers, refusing to surrender, tailor-made to dislocate words that I try to speak. I dread colliding against this familiar: when the memory gathers like burning hands around your throat.
John Kucera is a poet based in Arizona. His work has appeared in New Reader Magazine, Friends Journal, Connections Magazine and Rattle.