Chipmunk by Nathan Knutson

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by Rachel Coyne

We’re All Mad Here

I haven’t cried lately. Long enough to forget dreams of endlessness, of cockatoos, of circles of crimson. I live quietly as if I’ve aged all my years in this year. I worry about roadside strays and whether the people I pass on the street hate me. The sun-strewn miles grow into the stillness between us, the landscape of freckles on my cheekbones, this expansive emptiness. A colored woman’s road trip through a country waiting for me to go home. Birds grow louder as you travel south— bluejays and cardinals, innocent to the carelessness of legs and elbows, wooden canes and broken rocks. I wake up mute my mouth swallowed by gunshot wounds, my eyes eclipsed by the faces of mothers and their motherless sons. You should try just worrying about yourself, someone I’ve never liked tells me. I lose my mind and wonder if she’s right.

by Lilian Wang