Sleight
I have no idea how he does it, this man
with his braids like pretzel twists,
polo shirt red, color of his profession.
He’s ready with two lovely assistants.
One to distract with the promise
of stickers. The other to step forward
if there’s any resistance.
The magician draws back the tiny arrow.
His fingers flick. The needle leaps
into my son’s small wrist. The boy
doesn’t feel it. His blood slides
smooth into one vial, then two.
The magician slips out the needle quick
as he sank it, and there’s a bandage
over the puncture. He never smiles.
The children that come here need more
than magic. He’s just a passing trick.
*
Bones
If we’d had Appalachian grannies,
they might have shown us how
to throw those bones, inspect
angle, shape, and crack,
connect with ancestral knowing.
Instead, this was New Jersey,
and the most friendless girl I knew
was digging up her dead cat
for the fifteenth time, though this
was the first I’d seen of it.
No shaman, no peddler of relics,
she just wanted to see her again,
so she laid out the bones one by one
from the softening shoebox,
putting the skeleton in order:
Hyoid, clavicle, carpal and radius.
Gibbous scapula and matchstick ribs.
Pelvis ring that sprung one litter.
Each lonely vertebra. The tail’s spindly chain.
The skull she did not set
on dark March soil, but cuddled it
to her left breast bud.
I was afraid of the two gaping craters
where green orbits had lived,
the ghastly fangs. The girl asked,
Wasn’t she beautiful?
I was trying to be more to her
than witness, but this sealed it—
yes, our mothers sad dumbly
in their kitchens while our fathers
drank themselves numb—but we would
never be connected.
I could never dig up a dead cat.
I could never love something that much.
*
Morrow Dowdle is a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee and the author of the micro-chapbook Hardly (Bottlecap Press, 2024). Their work can be found in New York Quarterly, The Baltimore Review, Pedestal Magazine, and other publications. They run a performance series which features BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ voices. They are an MFA candidate at Pacific University and live in Durham, NC.