Weeds
Her last meal was a self-served bullet.
BIO
Sarah Frances Moran is a queer chicana poet living and writing in Waco, Texas with her partner and three dogs. She is the founder/editor of Yellow Chair Review. She dances to Selena in the kitchen while she cooks and wrangles crazy chihuahuas during her day job. Her chapbook Evergreen is forthcoming from Weasel Press. You may reach her at www.sarahfrancesmoran.com
And I wondered how she went from Jukebox dancing
and smiles birthed from the pit of her belly to feeling
like this was the last thing she could stomach.
And I wondered if she fabricated that smile in the
backroom of her devastation. The cold place where she housed
all the things she didn’t want the world to touch.
At 10 years old I only ever remembered how her smile led
the war against my own sadness. How my parents splitting
and my father’s violence ran at the sound of her excitement
of my arrival, shriveled and shrank as we dropped quarters
into that music machine, evaporated when the riff of Footloose
kicked up and how great it felt – to dance and be free.
The divorce didn’t matter. The large and looming expansion
of my world didn’t matter. Just the music and her laughter.
At 10 years old I wondered how that bullet tasted, how she
fell so low to swallow something so hollow.
At 33 I understand how sadness destroys the roots of where
our smiles grow. How that sadness suffocates like a weed.
I get that now;
and I’m searching for a weedkiller that works in the
depths of my personal winter.