by Alicia Wright

A window shrugged open and you, yellowed fingertips
hung limp over the rail, contrails of smoke
curling across the pane,

and the living room gone blue in the TV’s dim halo,
beamed through rust belt static;

your pale kitchen, a grayish patty melt souring
in the fridge; Icehouse tallboys half-drunk
and warming on the table and our boots
tossed together, red laces pooled on the stoop.

You don’t know I’ve quit, and I don’t know
the hole in your sweater closed
with strange stitches.

The last time you were like this, loose-limbed
and grinning, your sunken chest screamed
something I could almost hear.

There was whiskey, poured from the broken neck
of a bottle into your mouth over the sink. Maybe
it was Townes beneath the needle, gravel
soft through cotton-thick haze.

Here now you are head and shoulders and mended
sweater inside, unfolding yourself into the room.

Alicia Wright lives and writes in West Virginia and holds an MFA in poetry from Bowling Green State University. Her work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Twelve Mile Review, Eunoia Review, Thimble Literary Magazine, Same Faces Collective, and elsewhere.