Lonesome Errand
Rent from DeepDyve- Lonesome Errand
the red moon buoyant & the grocery cart shepherd driving his clanging row back inside & the walk to the car long & our blue bags of canned vegetables spinning in silent circles from our wrists & our time together incalculable, as if it would go on for us, the chips & dip on the dashboard, the KFC bucket turning above our heads, the cemetery on our right & then our left, & inside us, our sticky cells selfsame, our bellies full with the perfect peace of giving up, for today, on getting to know each other, how incessant that work had been, I admit, how exhausted we became with bewilderment, how bored with the pattern of windshield rain on the face of the other, cold cast of a streetlight on the face of the other & we wasted it like water some nights, we carried on as if there would be no lonesome errand, no next lives for us, my mother & I, though she knew the truth & said nothing. [End Page 47]
Shannon Sankey is the author of "We Ran Rapturous" (Atlas Review, 2019). Her poems have appeared at Poets.org, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, the minnesota review, Puerto del Sol, Sugar House Review, Barrelhouse, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a 2017 Academy of American Poets Prize and a 2019 SAFTA residency. She holds an MFA from Chatham University, where she was the Whitford Fellow. She is the founder of Stranded Oak Press.
