Dear Carole, There are bugs everywhere
Mobs of tight black bodies,
their imperceptible wings
flapping through the screens
of the south-facing windows.
It’s disgusting how the live
and dead bug bodies mingle
together on the sill, the floor,
moving and multiplying no
matter how often I take the
broom and Dustbuster to them.
I know what you would tell me:
Close the goddamn windows
already. But the sun is shining
in that friendly, far-flung
way that only happens in fall.
There’s a breeze that flits
through those wings. I guess
that was always the difference
between us – what we were
willing to sacrifice for comfort.
—
This selection comes from Sarah Chavez’s chapbook All Day, Talking, available from Dancing Girl press. Purchase your copy here!
Sarah A. Chavez, a mestiza born and raised in the California Central Valley, is the author of the chapbook, All Day, Talking published by Dancing Girl Press (2014). She holds a PhD in English with a focus in poetry and Ethnic Studies from the University of Nebraska – Lincoln. Her work can be found or is forthcoming in Luna Luna Magazine, So to Speak: Feminist Journal of Language and Art, among others. Her manuscript, This, Like So Much, was an Honorable Mention for the 2013 Quercus Review Press Poetry Book Contest. A selection from her chapbook manuscript All Day, Talking won the Susan Atefat Peckham Fellowship in 2013. She is a proud member of the Macondo Writers Workshop.
Jennifer Jackson Berry is the author of the chapbooks When I Was a Girl (Sundress Publications) and Nothing But Candy (Liquid Paper Press). Recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Booth, The Emerson Review, Harpur Palate, Moon City Review, Stirring, and Whiskey Island, among others. She lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
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