I like you like mischief, an ‘i before e’ moment,
the movement of my heart butterflying, battered, flayed
and wired up to monitors and X-rays.
When you asked me what’s at stake here, I only heard cake,
or was it betrayal, the way daylight holds failure
in stasis between aphasia and sainthood?
The weather is taking a break, is breaking
over the lake, breaking news like communion bread,
wine-soaked and warming your trachea.
Someone just tracked solitude in on their boots, someone
ran buckets of holy water until the font dried up.
Sorrow sings its own jingle, packs the apple in Adam’s throat.
I missed you because I was busy checking the stats.
The year I bought four hens, three grew to be roosters.
At night you came here with more hens in three sacks.
I missed you because I was busy with wingbeats and twigs.
Because I missed you, I went back to the beginning,
grabbed another decade, something static and deep
pocketed. There is still an electrode left over
from the EKG. When you let me go, I become Monday, waxen
and feathered, the body disclaiming, claiming —

Ronda Piszk Broatch is the author of Chaos Theory for Beginners (MoonPath Press, 2023), finalist for the Sally Albiso Prize, and Lake of Fallen Constellations, (MoonPath Press). She is the recipient of an Artist Trust GAP Grant. Ronda’s journal publications include Greensboro Review, Blackbird, Sycamore Review, Missouri Review, Palette Poetry, Moon City Review, and NPR News / KUOW’s All Things Considered. She is a graduate student working toward her MFA at Pacific Lutheran University’s Rainier Writing Workshop.