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Yellow Honeysuckles 

She used to pick honeysuckles and taste them from the wire fence just like her Mama,
with twisting brown-blonde curls, identical to her. She’d do whatever you say, Mama.
 
Everything in yellow sunshine, you tied together the world, knotting ignorance and light—
growing up building fairy houses, singing a hymn with your same gray eyes, Mama.
 
Now she’s chopping her hair and dying it red. Chipping off her black nail polish with rings
clinking on every finger, a covered-up body. It didn’t work when she tried to pray, Mama.
 
She wanted to stop him and him and him : looking from above, drained of yellow when he
didn’t taste like honeysuckles. He did not touch or love in your same, innocent way, Mama.
 
When she drives home, she wonders about twisting off the road. Or, perhaps she could
disappear into the woods, live in-between sticks and spotted mushrooms with the fae, Mama.
 
“Sophie, your name means wisdom!” But Sophie the wise lived in a sunny, honey world.
She, however, caught in a wire fence...tasted, plucked at, grown up : she can’t stay, Mama.

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Published by UNC Short Edition in 2021