by Susan Cossette
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| Image credit: Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images |
Blood moon rises over the horizon,
over Minneapolis, Auckland, Buffalo,
over blood spilled in schools and supermarkets,
hot orb, hatred splayed on the pavement.
In Minnesota you know you’re dead to the world
if you see your obituary in the Star Tribune a week before you die.
The loons’ eerie tremolos and yodels call to you—
outsider, peculiar threat, excised one, unwelcome.
Strange bugs come calling each spring.
They crawl up your walls in curious unison,
fleeing, seeking escape.
You find them on the kitchen floor,
dead in the window wells,
silent and withered.
Susan Cossette lives and writes in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The author of Peggy Sue Messed Up, she is a recipient of the University of Connecticut’s Wallace Stevens Poetry Prize. A two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Rust and Moth, Vita Brevis, ONE ART, As it Ought to Be, Anti-Heroin Chic, The Amethyst Review, Crow & Cross Keys, Loch Raven Review, and in the anthologies Fast Fallen Women (Woodhall Press), Tuesdays at Curley’s (Yuganta Press), and After the Equinox.
