Instead of Xanax

I want this age to be over and gone,
down bridle paths where ponies

wander with riders on foot
and reins dragging. I want peaches

put by, remedies renewed, a dog
in the car and enough sugar to cover

the bills. I want an hour of sleep
in a hammock under appaloosa light.

I want reason, apples and a book
playing all night long. I want decency,

mercy and the kidnapped returned.
Mercy. Mercy in the breath between

the righteous scream, the anthem
and the rebar scraped sky.

*

Last Night I Googled Your Name

It’s been ten years since we spoke,
me holding the phone two feet from
my ear, you scooping every imagined
slight from the cat box of your
childhood temper. If you were dead
or in jail, I would have heard, so it wasn’t
that. It wasn’t the pull of genetics, either,
as we’ve had a decade to prune the twisted
boughs off our family tree. Last night
I found a photo of us when we were
kids. You were laughing and goofy
with your eyes crossed, brandishing
a wooden spoon. I thought I was
in on the joke but had no idea
what was simmering.
I guess that’s why.

*

Sara Clancy a Philadelphia transplant to the Desert Southwest. Her chapbook Ghost Logic won the 2017 Turtle Island Quarterly Editors Choice Award. Among other places, her poems have appeared in Off the Coast, The Linnet’s Wings, Crab Creek Review, The Madison Review, and Verse Wisconsin. She lives in Arizona with her husband, their dog, two normal cats and a psychotic cross-eyed one.