Descanso
By Sheila Black
Go lightly. The way pain enters each day.
Light the candle of flowers that blooms
half-desiccated on the roadside.
South Texas, south San Anto.
The truck was parked through the hot morning.
No one heard the cries that rose from it.
Or recognized them as cries.
The purveyor on his cell phone in a field
(And this image haunts me more than all the others even—).
The white-yellow-red-black speckled-birds
flew into the sky at the same time.
A bare branch as a form of punctuation.
When the hospitals flung open their doors and emergency bays,
it was too late. They only waited over the blinking
coffee machines. No one felt a single breath of cold,
but everyone wished to.
Go sweetly, the way pain
enters. Or stop and put out a vase of flowers
for them, understanding in some appalled intimate way
how close they were
This story originally appeared in Stonecoast Review Issue 18.
Photo by Caleb Fisher.