by Laura Cherry

Circles

We were in the square when
softly it began to snow

                                                                  The paddock gate open
White powder filling the ruts

the sidewalk grew slippery
we ducked into a warm store

                                                                   Galloping in circles
Fear in the snorted breath

I tried on fur-lined boots
to kill time before the movie

                                                                   The panicky tossed head
The wild white eyes

where you left your glasses
and I returned for them

                                                                   Black riding skirt trailing
and I holding the crop

a week or a year later
when the snow was gone

Schrödinger’s Cad

Every day a new way to shoulder it:
you were a flimflammer or a misguided soul,

intimidated by my depth and brilliance
or smart to end it pre-disaster. It was

brief, inconsequential, five dates
and two fucks that stranded me here

like a deflowered Victorian heroine
condemned to eternal spinsterhood, or

a fifties girl group pleading in harmony,
doo-wop, darling, was it just a line?

Believing all the while that nothing happened
or everything did.

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Laura Cherry is the author of the collection Haunts (Cooper Dillon Books) and chapbooks Two White Beds (Minerva Rising) and What We Planted (Providence Athenaeum). She co-edited the anthology Poem, Revised (Marion Street Press), and her work has appeared in journals including Ekphrastic Review, Cider Press Review, and Hartskill Review.