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  • All Apologies
  • Jonterri Gadson (bio)

Choking on the ashes of her enemy Nirvana, “All Apologies”

A rumor starts as a whisper, a breathy message from an omnipotent they.

They say Jimmy ran away.

Suppose you’ve just been given a peppermint scented secret about a boy you probably would have loved next week. It will sting as if his turn had already come, hurt like he’d been the one to give you that unfamiliar too sweet to be sweat wetness in your flower-printed panties just by looking you in the eye today. You will want to be held, want to grab the nearest neck to drip I loved him in an ear,

you will want to be noticed.

When his body is found, you’ll drive to the coast to link arms with his family and set his ashes free over fickle waves, only, the ocean will refuse to hold him, will blow bits of Jimmy back in your face with a breeze saltier than his father’s tears.

In the distance, someone will mistake the sound of your choking on the ashes of a runaway as laughter. [End Page 887]

Jonterri Gadson

Jonterri Gadson recently received the MFA from the University of Virginia. She has published poems in Poetry Quarterly, Tidal Basin Review, PANK, The Rumpus, and other periodicals. She is currently a Herbert W. Martin Post Graduate Fellow in Creative Writing at the University of Dayton in Ohio.

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