don't get up. AUTHOR Sean Cho Ayres Outside that door there’s an entire world that wants us dead. Cacti store century old flash floods in the soft of their arms: I believe in drought and the unpuncturable silver tongues of desert lizards. How much sad ness can I blame on history, I’ve been unburying my father’s fathers for years now and the clouds still won't get fat with rain for me. We could scatter out belly fat in the sand for the vultures, cut off their wings and pretend we aren’t dying. Leave your shove. I’ll take off my shirt and dab your gut wound. Lodge our house key in the soft of your foot: when they find our bodies they’ll come back to our room and know we had nothing to leave. Close your eyes and take me by the elbow. This world has left us to become whatever we like. Yes. I’m terrified too. Sean Cho Ayres is an MFA candidate at the University of California Irvine. His work appears or is forthcoming in The Portland Review, 30North Literary Review, The Mangrove, and elsewhere. He is a staff reader for Ploughshares. In the summer of 2019 he was a Mary K. Davis scholarship recipient for the Bear River Writing Conference. Ayres’s manuscript Not Bilingual was a finalist for the Write Bloody Publishing Poetry Prize. Photo by Elias Domsch on Unsplash.
42 | APRIL 2020
