God forgot to create us
with masks
PPE to bind
our skeletons
as the blood sprays and sticks
like sap to our
fingernails, our
knuckles, fists
bound, yet ready
for the punch,
the kill, the weapon
to crack,
to smash the air
framing our eyes
holes
as mirrors of
the planet, the people
clawing their bedcovers
pull me out,
we scream
we shudder as our
fingertips press
the lover next to us
carved into our
sacred space
This poem was first published in The Drabble
Sallie Crotty has published many places, including The Dairy Hollow Echo; The Drabble; eMerge; and Resources to Recover. The Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow awarded her a residency in 2018. Sallie holds a B.A. in English from Sewanee: The University of the South, an Ed.M. from Harvard, and an MFA in Creative Writing from Queens University of Charlotte. She is working on a poetry collection, and her memoir Out of the Ashes: A Story of Recovery and Hope was published in 2022.
