Chronophobia
Laura Z. Fargrieve
The table was a constellation of lost knives and my fear was a nine-legged horse Needles of rosemary whickered and a thousand mornings spent slumped over chipped mugs were left as shadow sighs on the cedarwood The table was a constellation of lost knives and my fear was a nine-legged horse The knots were punctuation marks and the cleaver, the boning, the sheep’s foot paring spelled run, or nation and with reflections swimming in the dustless plain and the benches on each side, it was all the same The window rolled shut, the flies on the ledge guillotined and now my fear had no heartbeat and its last act was to settle inside of me, it folded its legs in the pit of my stomach.
Laura Fairgrieve received her MFA from Adelphi University. She is a winner of the Poets & Writers 2016 Amy Award. Her work appears in the anthology Women of Resistance: Poems for a New Feminism. Her poems also appear in Banyan Review, Arkana Magazine, Sublunary Review, Ink in Thirds, Underwater New York, Mortar Magazine, The Bitchin’ Kitsch, and Inscape Magazine, among others. She lives in New York.