by Shannon Sankey
Today the light
was brief, and we
stood to consider it
at the window.
The neighbor’s barn
was thirty blues
in quick succession, then
it was over with.
I thought of each
of my dead.
The house plants shook
and drew breath
imperceptibly.
If they signaled
some mild message
to one another,
it had probably nothing
to do with us.
Shannon Sankey is the author of We Ran Rapturous (The Atlas Review, 2019). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming at Poets.org, Best New Poets 2019, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, the minnesota review, Puerto del Sol, Sugar House Review, Barrelhouse, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a 2017 Academy of American Poets Prize and a 2019 SAFTA residency. She holds an MFA from Chatham University, where she was the Whitford Fellow.