Sara Fetherolf

SPRING COMES IN THE FORM OF FEVER DREAMS

Driveway awash, my car's bottom
ruts the rocks. I counted thirty vultures in the spruce,
my mother says and rubs the crack in her
thumb knuckle. Soapy hyacinth bloom
and white ammonia on the countertops.
I'm not saying I believe in omens but.

Bathtub a lifeboat I fill to the rim,
add salt and rosemary. Cough like taking out the bobby pin
that holds it all up. Taffeta black carrion fowl
perch on the roof, while on the porch
I drink weak coffee, while water runs from the eaves.
I'm like a cat she feeds but it comes back less often.

With mud-damp floormats and an exhaust leak, yes, that's me,
the one who always leaves. The radio broadcasts a flood watch
then Thunder Road. I'm here to pick you up.
We climb chainlink and let go, tumble to the dead
weeds around the municipal watertower, dry now, left behind.
Go up slow, foot slips, cold drip from above.

On the eye of it we smoke in the stormlight.
Below us, bald-budded trees
and what melts. The floor slopes edgeward to a long fall.
If you die at the end of winter
does your winter never end?
          Height-sick, I give him my keys

and roadhead on the shortcut.
At the A&P, chicken for soup.
At his parents' a cup of Throat Coat
and movie about shipwreck.
I've been picturing the afterlife all wrong
—a flooded campsite, climb over chainlink

to a fireweed meadow, the farm's garbage furrow
my grandmother in her girlhood found, corpsehair filled
hairbrush, blonde prairie wind, orphanhood that gets in the blood.

Hot to the touch, he says. Nervous
gas flame in the kitchen to brew a second cup
                              —St. Elmo's Fire
that hissed on her homestead—there's thunder
at the door. I can't tell if you're watching or asleep.
Out the window, rain eats the world.

Sara Fetherolf spent parts of her childhood in California, the Midwest, rural New Jersey, so her writing is inspired by the odd dreamscapes and back-roads that make up this country. Her poems are forthcoming or have recently appeared in Red Paint Hill, So To Speak, The Chattahoochee Review, Salamander, A Women's Thing, and Hypertrophic Literary, where she was nominated for a Pushcart in 2015. In Fall 2016, she will be attending the Creative Writing & Literature PhD program as USC as a Dornsife Fellow. In the meantime, she lives in Brooklyn and teaches at Hunter College, where she received her MFA degree.