She blinked like
mid-June nightfall
and the world pruned,
wobbled from her
as if spilled
from a raisin box.
She blinked as if
the earth and the heavens
met in her eyelid’s crease,
where beetles hum in reeds
and lazy streetlights clack.
She blinked as if she whisked
the rippled sky orange
with her fingers
down her tired road
to the sun’s festering embers.
The same blink
each time she handed me
from boxes at her feet
a chipped figurine, a glass-globed
grasshopper, a framed picture
of Grandpa.
“These are for you.”
She wrapped with her hands
my hands around each trinket,
skin wimpled as clouds,
sifting backward
to light’s distant beginning.
About Matthew LaFreniere
Matt LaFreniere received his MFA in poetry from Fairfield University. He teaches English at a boarding school in Lynchburg, Virginia, where he and his wife are expecting their first child. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Dissections, Diverse Voices Quarterly, Schuylkill Valley Journal, and Spry Literary Journal.
