Issue 11.1 Fall 2015

11.1 cover image

 

About the Author

Nigel Meyer is a junior majoring in Creative Writing at University of Southern Indiana. Should his poems be accepted it would be his first publication. Nigel lives in Evansville, Indiana.

 

Hot in October

 

Nigel Meyer

 

 

Can you shut up, please?
she says to me, over the
click—click—click
of the cart
some campus worker is rolling
across the evenly dispersed
concrete lines.
I’ve barely started
the first chorus of
“So happy together!”
and already she is pissed
because her brother
comes home
tomorrow.
She isn’t ready
to see him yet,
He deserves the time
she’d said at Christmas
two years ago
when the hole in the wall
hadn’t been patched yet
and her father’s car
was being searched for any
evidence, drug related.
It was cold when he busted
though the Christmas
tree, luckily, in the kitchen
everyone was begging
for some of her mother’s
pie.

Now hot in October,
I take all the heat.
Her mother called,
I walked away and listened
a bird reminded me of
the song which her family
couldn’t be. And now
her brother
was coming through
the walls of their lives
they’d covered
with cheap drywall
that everyone could see
from the outside.

 

 

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