On the rooftop one lawn chair
and an old cooler while the heat
of a city below builds like weeds
cracking concrete. Emma shares the view
from here with no one anymore,
free again to sweat and stink. She casts
her empties off into the dark alley
no longer worried she might
crown someone—she now knows
that's the price of city life,
the way wasps working down a trellis
leave now pointless flowers behind.
She's taken to counting her days
by the silence. Her great-grandmother
complains she squandered her best years
changing diapers and cooking cracklins,
but Emma wonders if the breadth of
such a life has its favor. Her own hands are
so soft and pale, never packed a miner's lunch,
never scoured a tub after bathtime. Some nights
she holds those hands up to the streetlight,
swears she can see right through them.
Tom Barlow is an American writer of novels, short stories and poetry, whose work has appeared in journals including Ekphrastic Review, Voicemail Poetry, Hobart, Tenemos, Redivider, The New York Quarterly, The Modern Poetry Quarterly, and many more. See tombarlowauthor.com.