Woman Hollowed Out and Losing Weight

Listen, Sister, I’ve gathered seven witnesses
and a decade of evidence to prove your misery
a mirage. I’ve set loose the machinery
of fox teeth and raptor beak to pluck

at your cocoon. True, you are a skilled weaver
of the snug shroud, have included the proper pleats
to avoid being bitten, but the time arrives for release.
Salt in short supply. Your daughters’ voices

mute. Trust if I could offer some private
exultation, I’d call in the crow and the clown.
The red balloons of our youth. Yet the days
pass, silenced in your darkened house.

I command you now to wake from this hibernating state.
There is rapture for your palate if only you would taste.

Sandy Longhorn has received the Porter Fund Literary Prize and the Collins Prize (Birmingham Poetry Review). She is the author of three books of poetry: The Alchemy of My Mortal Form, The Girlhood Book of Prairie Myths, and Blood Almanac. Her poems have appeared in The Cincinnati Review, diode, Hayden’s Ferry Review, North American Review, Oxford American, Thrush, and elsewhere. Longhorn teaches in the Arkansas Writer's MFA program at the University of Central Arkansas, where she directs the C.D. Wright Women Writers Conference.