Set your timer. Enter
your mind palace,
any temporary task
to distract you
from the breaking glass,
the chandeliers
fracturing to shrapnel,
breathing in
a cold and spiky effort.
Tell yourself this will do
no harm. No—less harm
than a mother in traffic bed-heavy
or three a.m. angry that sacrifice
after all, is umbilical.
Ponder the liquid states
of the matter beneath you,
which is no sign of natural
disaster moving through you
snapping the oldest oaks,
all your inner orchards
uprooted like elephant bones.
You are not holding a live wire,
its current not turning
your inner workings to ash.
Pat him. Say there, there.
Make sounds with your mouth
he cannot comprehend
except to smell you,
to know you are there,
and not there.
Inure him to doubt,
the distance from him to summer,
its vines honeying the air
from some unspecified fence,
bragging its nectar
with little yellow tongues.

Elizabeth Cranford Garcia’s work has or will soon appear in journals such as Tar River Poetry, CALYX, Dialogist, SoFloPoJo, Mom Egg Review, Psaltery & Lyre, and SWWIM, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Her chapbook, Stunt Double, was published in 2016 through Finishing Line Press. She is the current Poetry Editor for Dialogue: a Journal of Mormon Thought, a Georgia native and mother of three. Read more of her work at elizabethcgarcia.wordpress.com.