Sonnet to Lucy
       

Your face, vein-lit, bone-lit, lit by fear
you are ugly, no one likes you. Smile,
Lucy, shine like a gun, and one day you'll foam
to amber and golden, a frothy
liquid all the fathers love, their sons
waiting for the day they can drink
in a spray of sprinklers, summer glassdrops,
carbamate grass, Ikea chair, an empty
their boys can't see. Lucy, the unlovely,
the tub that is lard, it seems each decade
there's a new victim, same ganglion
of girls that peck and cackle. In my vision,
you and I banshee the branches, shatter to claw
and turn one gold girl to a blubber of caw.

Tweet

Copyright © 2017 Claudia Cortese All rights reserved
from Wasp Queen
Black Lawrence Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission