Bad Weather, by Maria McLeod

You flit across the inside
            of my eyelid.
My face cracks, my hair
            falls out. Flock
of gnats, belly full
            of bees. We used to drink
and stain our teeth
            maroon. I was a candle.
Your fingers
            were matchsticks.
We traded air
            for light.
Now that you’ve gone
            to seed, it’s even ground
you seek. But I’m bad
            weather — rain
flooding your field
            of vision.
We make our marks
            on water — impermanent,
            leave no evidence.

a

Maria McLeod lives in a cedar-shingle cabin at the edge of the Pacific Northwest’s Cascade Mountain range where it rains a lot, providing abundant opportunity to write. She’s won the Indiana Review Poetry Prize, the Robert J. DeMott Short Prose Prize and the WaterSedge Poetry Chapbook Contest. McLeod is the author of two poetry chapbooks, “Mother Want,” published in 2021, and, forthcoming, “Skin. Hair. Bones.,” to be released in 2022.

© 2021, Maria McLeod