I tried to subtract stones from soil    in a negative sun and it was all too broken. You kept planting old jars,

full of teeth—not yours, or maybe, but who could possibly tell

and you said the weather was pulling you along like a dog on a

rope. It could burn your hands, like this:          and here are the facts—

our eye sockets were filled with wine

someone was falling off the roof

the flowers were swallowing something a bit too large

and that was not me you saw waving on the platform, it was another woman with my voice and my hands,

you were looking for the salt for the ice growing on the front steps.



This is not salt. It’s a circle, the way I stop breathing and you don’t       a crack in the window lets in all the

comets and they’ve sprouted by morning—

I’ve got to find a trowel or smash them back into the floor. They’re like psalms, really—you can’t stop

speaking them in your sleep. Nuclear sparks creep around the room.



This isn’t how it happened, not exactly.

There was a funeral procession coming down the street and they were throwing petals at us. You cracked a

whip into the ceiling until it rained pearl water        all over the floor

and I tried to fix the lacerations with tape.

The drops of blood were pennies children would pick up off the floor.


Laura E. Miller received her Bachelor’s in Poetry from Columbia College Chicago in May 2013. She was raised in Louisville, Kentucky, and currently lives in Chicago with all of her cats. Her work has also appeared in Columbia Poetry Review no. 26.