By Jessica Barksdale

We traveled to the theater destination,
an entire town dedicated to Shakespeare,
and saw not one play. What to blame?
A plague. A heatwave. A tremendous
bout of wildfire, white sky snowing ash.
Instead, we ate in the shade of an oak,
lay back for long facials, and saw a
movie about atomic explosions.
Later, a refund promised, we packed
up and left, each going in separate
directions, one north, one south, the way
we have been going since I moved
from our shared hometown, our
friendship torn, our time an attenuated
wire, strong but slim, we no longer thirty
and forty but sixty and seventy, old women,
changeless but changed, we not paired
by work or avocation but by habit
and love. But there you are on our last
walk, gray hair dotted by what the fire ate,
what the fire took away. You pressed
one hand against your mouth,
laughing anyway.

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Jessica Barksdale’s seventeenth novel, What They Found at the Lake, is forthcoming in 2026. She has published three poetry collections, When We Almost Drowned (2019), Grim Honey (2021), and Let’s End This Now (2024). She taught at Diablo Valley College in Pleasant Hill, California, and continues to teach for UCLA Extension and in the online MFA program for Southern New Hampshire University.