Girls on the Slide
by Sarah Busse
“I’m on fertility drugs,” she says.
The sun along the ground like knives. “We still want
a second child and now
I’m on fertility drugs and angry all the time.
I dream of burning houses, smashing—” she keeps her eyes
on the line of trees—”people.”
This is where coyotes live. Knowing that,
we’ve brought our daughters out in boots, fleece, mittens,
to splash in snow, puddles
of slush and thaw. They lob a nerf. We stand the wind
as the girls tumble the hill, get up giggling. Grit in the eyes,
the sun starts down.
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Sarah Busse is the co-editor (with qarrtisluni contributor Wendy Vardaman) of the poetry magazine Verse Wisconsin. Her chapbook, Quiver, is available from Red Dragonfly Press, and chapbooks are forthcoming from Finishing Line Press and Desperado Press. She lives with her husband and two children in Madison, Wisconsin. You can find her online with a bunch of other cool poets at bookthatpoet.com.
I like “lob a nerf.”