[Cato] said he was surprised that one haruspex did not burst
out laughing when he saw another one.
Every day was the same: something to eat; don’t get killed; try to outsmart the poison. Exiting blackthorn & slipping into the moon of a mirror like a kite. Now sun like afterlife & horseflies on his back. World before & beyond his snout, face of a desert or dumpster. Now a celebrity at this roadside zoo. They spray him with hose water. He laps from a tin bowl. Children take his picture even when he naps in the middle of the day, dreaming in wolf-pack of fruit & desolation, of graveyard picnics, throats of roses. When I fell from the roof & broke my fall with my wrist I said I broke my wrist falling. To be haunted one must only breathe.
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Flower Conroy is the author of Snake Breaking Medusa Disorder, A Sentimental Hairpin, and Greenest Grass (or You Can’t Keep Killing Yourself & Not Expect to Die), winner of the Blue Lynx Poetry prize, forthcoming 2022. LGBTQ+ writer, NEA and MacDowell Fellow, and former Key West Poet Laureate, her poetry will appear or has appeared in American Poetry Review, American Literary Review, New England Review, Prairie Schooner, and others.