While I Was Sleeping

I walked on eggshells until the yolks

revealed themselves as the true enemies.

Then I beat myself up over

the inevitable, which, too, was inevitable.

The sun told the moon

to thank her lucky stars chickens

kept hatching, uncounted by sheep

pretending they gave a fuck who fell

asleep.

Blame

My anxiety was all

about my mother, my fear

that she would die, the threats

that she might live

forever in the hole my father

punched in their bedroom wall.

While we are being honest, I guess

part of me is pissed off

that after I carried her around

all those years, heavy with emergency,

she turned out just fine

once I put her down.     

Have I Mentioned My Brain

hurts? Swimming headless

in a sea of facemasks feels futile.

I would bob for apples, baby

myself and my misery, melancholy

as we both are, if I thought

that might do the trick to restore waves

that remember drowning themselves,

the crown to my stump of a neck.

 

April Salzano is the co-editor at Kind of a Hurricane Press and is currently working on a memoir about raising a child with autism, as well as several collections of poetry. Her work has been twice nominated for a Pushcart Award and has appeared in journals such as The Camel Saloon, Centrifugal Eye, Deadsnakes, Visceral Uterus, Salome, Poetry Quarterly, Writing Tomorrow and Rattle. Her chapbook, The Girl of My Dreams, is available from Dancing Girl Press. Her poetry collection Future Perfect is forthcoming from Pink Girl Ink. More of her work can be read at aprilsalzano.blogspot.com