Fable

Sarah Edwards

Deep in the country the Wegmans lights

are gold like one big promise and the radio stutters

like the soft fingers of a poet, months before

he professed belief that we were good

for one another because of mutual ugliness.

Not everything is this Calvinist, withheld

or foretold, though it might seem so: A hurricane

lamp shade the sum of its flickering. It was

a hard winter and there will be another. And in April

nothing resolved but the reach of the bottle

blond snow—and when we set out into the starry

mess the Bluetick hound let loose, her brain a beautiful

zero of love and went and went until she knew

it was time to rub her body like moss along the lake.

Sarah Edwards is a writer whose fiction and poetry has appeared in Ninth Letter, Subtropics, The Stinging Fly, and The Southern Humanities Review, among other places. She lives in North Carolina.
Originally published:
July 12, 2023

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