(Inspired by Red Dawn)
The girl’s a goner, so when she asks him to tug the pin
from the grenade and leave her, he doesn’t resist.
She wants to just be for a while before she’s not,
to listen to the hush of frigid wind, let it shiver her skin
into the tiny bumps that means she’s alive. The sky is pale
as a page, flecked only by the inky slashes of crows.
On it she sketches a scene she can survive, which looks more
like heaven than here. She focuses on the grenade’s serrated skin,
how it slickens in her drenched palm, how it’s like so many other
things she clutched that she should’ve cast.
Distant disasters approach, she feels their thud, knows her tether
to this moment is trip-wire thin.
Isn’t every girl a goner? Every girl holding a grenade between herself
and the world, hoping to stay just out of the villain’s view,
always on the cusp of rage. Her teeth a tornado, mouth a massacre,
fingers a fist, body a bomb.
–
Kami Westhoff is the author of Sleepwalker, winner of Minerva Rising’s Dare to Be Award, and Your Body a Bullet, co-written with Elizabeth Vignali. Her work has appeared in various journals, including Meridian, Carve, Contrary, Third Coast, Passages North, The Pinch, West Branch, and Waxwing. She teaches creative writing in Bellingham, WA.