Shelby Dale DeWeese

Vanishing Act

 
The way your stomach seizes
and the light turns greenish grey
when the night you spent glazed open
slithers into daytime.
These hours, when the sky resembles
a screen, are the best hours
for turkey hunting,
in that place you left
in such a rush. When you go back
it’s shrunken. You wonder
if you’re sleeping
or if you’ve forced your own
forgetting. Here are the magnolias –
or where they used to be, and here is where
you turned left on your way to school.
Where are the bricks, the rose
bushes, the basketball hoop
you never used? You see yourself
unlocking the door, staring up
at the taxidermized turkey over the mantelpiece.
It posed above your childhood,
unblinking. Now meet its marble gaze.




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Shelby Dale DeWeese grew up on a farm in the southeastern United States, but now lives and writes in California. She earned her MFA from the University of San Francisco, and her poems have been published by Rust+Moth, Quaint Magazine, and other publications. She is the social media manager for Pinwheel, a journalist for MuggleNet, and a programs coordinator at 826 Valencia.