The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: I’ll Buy You a Bird Instead by Natalie Easton

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Laws of Motion

Hunting season you’d slow down & honk
to a bevy of flipped white tails, angry

flashes of orange. That’s how the memory
begins, as if it started there: a small town

cliché. Your boyfriend went crazy, pulled
a gun on us one night—I remember

the bullets on top of the fridge, how your cat
went missing. Other than that it’s scattered,

like our police reports. My wet nose &
oil-gloss eyes in the neighbor’s kitchen;

I was a doe, all limbs & prickly hair.
At the head of the drive, in the flashing lights,

I moved in; you pushed me back. For every
action, an equal & opposite—that much

still makes sense. There are those who
let things go: kids with balloons, to see how far

they’ll fly; Buddhas & saints; the dying before
they leave. I am not these—I remember:

his gun, the beam of his flashlight, the sound
of the door you slammed to save me. & then

the recurring dreams: I could not find my class.
I woke to become the homeless girl thumbing

ten dollars in the cereal aisle,
                        going to school to drop Spanish III.

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