FRACTURED
The snow maids
among us are idle
angels too terrified
to plumb the icy depths
of murderous woe.
Their eyes are thick with wax,
smiles startled artifice,
words unintelligible skeletons.
Lovers cannot repair
the distance;
they are but shadows
on the lawn, roosters
who savage along.
I shall be well again a hollow
phrase they repeat in therapy
where they dream
someday it will ring
sapphire true.
Until then they lie
in bleached valleys
of waste and shame,
fractured mirrors,
aborted stars.
* * *
Lorie Adair is the recipient of several Norman Mailer Scholarships and Arizona Commission on the Arts Creative Writing fellowships. Spider Woman’s Loom was a finalist for the Southwest Writers Award and a semi-finalist for the Dana Award. She has written for NPR affiliate, KJZZ, and her fiction and creative non-fiction have appeared in Hippocampus Magazine, Kindred, Praxis Journal of Gender and Cultural Critiques, and Terrain.org. She earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University, Los Angeles. She currently resides and teaches in Phoenix.
