LOVE LETTER WRITTEN ON LAKE MICHIGAN

Zebra mussels
Quagga mussels
Sand pit
Rock
O tree that grows from rock
Promontory fireside
Tour—architectural
Tour—twenty dollars
Suicidal lady
in a long white dress

Green river give me liberty
or give me your lakehouse!
Give me my lakehouse.
Please give me your aunt’s lakehouse.

We ride the Metro North three hours down
to Indiana.

My mouth
opens on yours like a fish.

[IN THE BACK BEHIND THE SHED . . .]

In the back behind the shed there is a man who kills insects
by profession
making use of a long metal nozzle.

It’s afternoon. Soon I will pack up this house and place it
inside of another house. Wherefore
the trumpet vine has poisoned me.
In the tending of my own garden.

As the woman
at the fire
in the fine
homestead.

And here: the wet white shirt I pull from my breasts like a sticker.

We watch through my kitchen window
—the weather mild—
as he sweeps the porch of its dead.

—

Avigayl Sharp is a writer from Chicago, Illinois. Her fiction and poetry have appeared or are forthcoming in New England Review, Hobart, DIAGRAM, and Pleiades. She received her MFA from The Michener Center for Writers in Austin, Texas.