By Shelly Cato

Featured Art: Notes and sketches from “Life as distraction as practice as discovery” by Zelda Thayer-Hansen

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀One Morning Before School

A tricorn hook pierced a night
       crawler before
       entering a boy’s
       thumbnail—
       the bone

At the same moment
      a grain of grit shifted
      into his mother’s left eye
      which remained to stick—
      twitch

On her cutting board
       apple peelings wilted—
       and the hound
       outside jowled
       ham fat 

Behind a shed
       seldom used for skinning
       the boy waited  
       for his school bus—
       nursed blood

from his thumb—believed
       in the way his mother
       arranged his lunchbox—
       believed he would live
       to open his lunchbox

that day

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Shelly Cato’s writing has appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, 2024; Iron Horse Literary Review, 2023 NaPoMo Winner, Rattle, Poet Lore, Washington Square Review, and TriQuarterly Review.

She lived in the Mississippi Delta for 25 years and now writes on Mulberry Fork in Walker County, Alabama. When she is on the river on her paddleboard, it is still on the river—sometimes—and there is peace. And she can see things she would never have seen before. She is passionate about genre-bending and experimenting with form, long poems and refrains, and blurring lines between truth and imagination.

Instagram: @shellyscato Facebook: @shellyscato X: @shellycato