By Sara Fetherolf

            You bring up
a detuned garble like a dear bone
unearthed from the garden
of your 2am sleep, upright
in bed, keyed
to your dream,
looking straight beyond
me as you sing.

            All spring
with your wah wah and distortion
pedal, I’ve heard you playing
the Stormy Monday
Blues in other rooms.
I have eavesdropped
on the breaks, counted up
the bills to your lord-have-mercies.

            If one of us
gets snake-bit, then,
it better be me. You’ll descend
with a five-bar
earworm to spring me from
the subterranean territories, blaze
trails through the lightless
pomegranate groves. No

god of death could fail to find
your full-throated tenor
convincing.
            Your skin
in the dark is a lyre
string I touch to stop
resonating, and you

look back, confused
in the new silence, then drop
to sleep. And I come
tumbling after, down that long
chute, the future, where
we wait in the aftermath
of your song (tears
on the cheeks of Spring) and know

it was perfect, and fear
what’s gone is gone.

---

Sara Fetherolf (she/they) is the author of Via Combusta (New American Press, 2022). They won the 2021 Iron Horse Long Story award and they have writ- ten text for song cycles and short operas that have been performed around the country. Their writing appears in publications like Best Microfiction 2023, Gulf Coast, CALYX, Storm Cellar, and Gigantic Sequins.