A Work of Art

LINDSEY WARREN

I wanted to return my mother’s cake tin but she disappeared. Long before she died she disappeared. A body under some snow was what I was thinking: thoughts through a doom that had one breath free. The snow didn’t know for sure but I stretched out on it anyway, and a fear left the dark outline of my figure so I could be clear with the sky. Night came to knowing my mother had never baked a cake by its light or lightlessness, that that was just something I had wished for so I could feel lit from the inside. Forgive me. In my ears the earth turned and I sensed the stars wobble for shining in the room winter made. A room for those who thought that there was nothing they couldn’t know but still doubted, a room where I found myself in the middle of a story I couldn’t leave. The cake tin was cold to the touch, the waffle moon, perfect and giving, knew where all the birds were sleeping. No one knew where I was sleeping, I was alone and cold, the sketch of my shadow on the snow a fanatic purple, the weight of death a weightlessness I couldn’t bear.

Lindsey Warren is a graduate of Cornell University’s MFA program. She has been published in Rabid Oak, Josephine Quarterly, American Literary Review and Hobart, among others. Her poetry manuscript Unfinished Child is out from Spuyten Duyvil, and her second entitled Archangel & the Overlooked is forthcoming. The first chapter from her novel-in-progress will be published by Litbreak Magazine in September.