Fiction Podcast
She read for the host
the voice of a person who’d died alone
in the middle of life, her body pulled
from the side of the road.
The clouds filled with blue air.
Half asleep on the highway
I heard from the back seat
her warm, current world,
her living lungs, a voice preserved online,
blasted into the car
as sound, I thought of yours,
so you could breathe,
or breathe through the lake,
a ray of dirty light.
Winter trees, damp at their cores,
shot through with sun,
they served as your shade, stripes
over your last minute’s leaves,
their hidden roots crawling
through molten memory.
Wet spot where your thoughts went flat.
I didn’t see you die near living deer,
look at you left in that way,
rippling out, cops in their moods,
the last to touch you in time,
lifted the body, slid it into the trunk,
and took you to your tone.
Tea
The door rings me awake, a package,
The guy’s gone by the time I open it
Inside a box a bag of my grandfather’s ties, printed with buds,
Stripes, the name of his college
Georgia Tech, my cousins finished
Clearing everything out of his house, same house
Where my mother learned
To eat, pee, read
Emily Hunt is the author of the poetry collections Stranger and Dark Green. She has also published two books of art: Cousins, a collection of photo prints, and This Always Happens, a series of drawings and short texts. She lives in New York. More info at emilyrhunt.org and @emilyhunt_poet.
