It Bathes Itself

She asks “How’s that supper.” No response. Her daughter bikes around the cul-de-sac with a piece of toast held between her teeth like a platform for something to land on. Plum jam is so sticky it’s almost magnetic. Each evening after doing the dishes, her long private argument with death; sprinklers. She warns her daughter not to run through them with her mouth open. “That’s poop water.” With her naked hands, she shoves wet lumps of sausage, cheese, bread, and onions into her disposal and turns it on. It is sunset. Her daughter’s eyes spin slowly, and the drain complains. And then it sighs, hungry, and then it goes quiet.

ξ

Alarm

It would be so simple to wake up earlier. To change everything around — it could be done so neatly.
How easy to learn French! I’ll just begin the rest of my life.
Down the hall, there’s a theater where young adults practice yelling and fighting without hurting each other, I mean physically. The sound of slaps and shouts down the hall. We carry everything for the rest of it, I mean life, I mean physically. Or not physically. I mean, just think about my limbs in the early morning!
I’d get so much done. I’d leave so much behind me.

ξ

Lindsey Webb is the author of the chapbooks House (Ghost Proposal, 2020) and Perfumer's Organ (above/ground press, forthcoming). Her writings have appeared in Chicago Review, Denver Quarterly, and Lana Turner, among others. She was named a 2021 National Poetry Series finalist and serves as poetry editor for Quarterly West. She lives in Salt Lake City, where she is a Steffensen Cannon fellow in the PhD program in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Utah.