Jennifer Bullis

Thinking of Leanna

You taught parachuting,
said you loved the sky
and its ecstasies where it met the earth.

You rode a seal-bay racing mare named Éclat
across Cascade passes.

You said one dry June, Éclat’s steel shoe
scraped a rock and sparked a fire.
You stomped it out but Éclat took flight.

You both knew ways back to Mazama,
met there by nightfall.

Later that summer your skydiving partner
mispacked his chute and fell off the map.
Éclat sliced a pastern on a downed electric fence.

You moved to Las Vegas
and took up day-trading with a man

you suspected had murdered his wife.
You called me once, told me you’d gotten rich,
said that kind of success

was stochastic as lightning.
You never called again, but years later,

I still sometimes glimpse Éclat from the I-5
grazing with the other retirees
in the tree farm on the Snohomish floodplain.

I picture you pacing in a darkened
penthouse apartment in a risk-built city

glancing out the windows
to check on the clouds, tightening
the screws on all the switchplates,

hoping for something dangerous
and dazzling to strike.

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Jennifer Bullis is the author of Impossible Lessons (MoonPath Press) and of poems and essays appearing in The Shore (Issue 19), Gulf Coast, Indiana Review, Lake Effect, RHINO Poetry, Terrain and U City Review. She is an Artsmith Residency Fellow, recipient of honorable mention for the Gulf Coast Prize, and finalist for the Brittingham & Pollak, Wheelbarrow Books and Moon City Poetry Prizes. She holds a PhD from University of California-Davis and lives in Bellingham, Washington.