Serpentine
I hear mosquitos
jazzing
in the haze - John Cosner, Swamp Road
Every father this side of the Mason Dixon line
has three stories, two jokes, and one point.
They all walk into a bar and say nothing.
When I turned 37, I declared: just because
I choose to not have children, doesn’t mean
I don’t want kids. There is a difference
between happiness and scouring the bayou
for something akin. Like how in the first
version of this poem I was just an enjambment
until I heard my father’s mosquitos jazzing
in the haze. What I’m trying to tell you is:
I only know how to be a daughter —
not a wife, or a sister, or even a friend.
But then, of course, there was the time
he saved my mother from a viper —
stay…very…very…still — and I learned
a man is a kind of quiet found only
on Swamp Road. What kind of grace requires
this much repetition? Snake dress thread
-bare before wedding season even starts.
Woo-Woo Girls
Elena had her elixirs, Mary: The Cards.
I spent the better part of my Jesus year
trying to figure out who instructed:
We begin an incantation by noticing
how it floats above incapable in the dictionary.
Scouring the apartment for a vessel
to no end: “Any clear thing will do!”
At the solstice party, Jenny took a picture
of my aura. It was blue like painted gas
station flowers picked up at 3 am after
leaving, to apologize for having left,
having returned only to leave again
the next morning. A hue I now associate
with clairvoyance, angels no longer there
to catch my breath. After he died,
I spent too much time alone in the woods —
welcomed spider bites and let thorny
branches cut my wrists like a suburban
teenager. That’s how complicit the trees
were, my being lost in the grove.
Alice said: I think you used to be a fairy
in another life. Here, eat the bark
of this uprooted poplar so it knows you
once belonged to it. Perhaps then it will let you
have what you’ve always dreamed of:
Sleep without flying away in the night.
Colette Cosner is a recipient of the Ruth Stone Poetry Prize from Hunger Mountain Review and her work has appeared in publications such as Poetry Northwest, The Normal School, Pacifica Literary Review, Peatsmoke Journal, Pinch, Meridian, Allegory Ridge Poetry Anthology and elsewhere. Originally from Massachusetts, Colette currently lives in Seattle, WA. She was a 2025 writer-in-residence with Casa Lü Sur in Mexico City. Website: colettecosner.com