Little Boat
Robin Turner
Originally appeared in the now defunct Virga Magazine
Something about tonsils
but I heard tunnels,
tunnel, narrow passage-
way deep inside me. I heard
sills, sill, curtains lifting
on a breeze, little boat setting sail.
My five-year-old throat
thick with bees, burning
with world. I’d been trying to swallow it
whole, trying to speak it back out.
They gave me a doll with a pull-chain
voice. One hard yank and she would talk.
Robin Turner has recent work in Eratio, Clementine Unbound, One, Literary Mama, and Heron Tree. Her chapbook, bindweed & crow poison, is available from Porkbelly Press. She lives in the Piney Woods of East Texas.