Christine Light

I knew a scrub daddy

who lay face-down in our yard
we couldn’t remember if he was ours
so he stayed for days, no legs

no voice to beg for mercy, I wanted
to save him from baking under this
cloudless sky but couldn’t get past

the idea that some other woman
might have washed her hands with him
might have gazed at his shape, flayed

under the light of a fluorescent sun
intimacies crossing there—he might
have been ours, his smile face-down

in ecstasy, waiting to come home
but I can’t take that risk, I have mistaken
too many mouths for my own.

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Christine Light lives in Florida, where she co-leads a twice-monthly poetry workshop and chairs the Publications Committee for the Laura (Riding) Jackson Foundation. She also works as a mental health coach. Her short fiction won Globe Soup’s 2021 Flash Fiction Competition as well as their eighth 7-Day Story Writing Challenge. She has a craft essay published in Assay and poetry forthcoming in Little Patuxent Review. She's working on a poetry manuscript. Christine is the former Lead Poetry Editor and Lead Copy Editor at Revolute and is pursuing an MFA at Randolph College.