Looking Glass

Nancy Ripley

The sun licks the glass and creates pictures on its liquid skin. It fills the ache inside of me. I am a well that is barren, playing music in a raging storm, building sly-by-night ladders out of hands in the midst of a drought. I have a staring contest with the sun’s unwavering body, a force of commanding attention. She bats her eyelashes and breathes smoke that chokes the notion of focus from your dribbling lips. I leave with striped cheeks and questions and I still need to find out who the victor is at the end of the looking-glass war. I am not your God, wondering woman. I am too selfish to love beyond the air of summertime. Stop this nonsense and fold your body into mine.

My eyes are not quite themselves after this war. They are strangers against my dormant, butterfly skull, fluttering like mingling hosts and lost causes, like the attention span of a child in the winding streets of Rome or France or Peru.

I do not trust them with the rest of the girl. She is scared of hushing lips, of quiet malevolence that feels kind and stifling and wholly parental. Handprints lay flush on my temples, picking apart the excess of my daydreams and smothering them whole. Killers, claim my manuscript. A tight wrapper of stone lays against the sand in my eyes so it does not leak and spread a sleeping plague To those same little children.

This shade is obscuring, the light is blinding –pin-pricks of motion dance behind my sturdy, burnt eyelids and I feel whole with the pain. There is a boy who plays behind the curtains of my home, pulling on the greying cotton and making my caged birds shriek a battle cry of warning. Do not take her word for it, love. She is a liar at the best of times, and the looking glass is covered in thick dust and all shaken up. Guzzle warm rain from nimbostratus mouths, complacent lover, take care with my soul.

When She Leaves

Emma Matthews

‘For this world is not our permanent home, we are looking forward to a home yet to come.’

– Hebrews 13:14 (nlt )

After a wrinkled woman props her glasses on the nightstand for the last time, she leaves like a dozing child whose eyes close in the back seat but open in their room. Is it possible to wake somewhere other than where we fall asleep? Maybe God is the father’s eyes glued to the midnight road and the mother’s arms carrying her child in from the car.

I expect the woman wakes to that smell you only notice when you’ve been gone –the dust of a house that’s been missed.