Mackenzie Carignan
You warn me to look at the crosshatch
by tracing the lines with your thumb,
curled fingers turning like the barrel
of a revolver in stylish ritual. Love bugs, hind-end
first, swarm the atmosphere even after attaching. A pair
lands on my arm and seems to get lost all at once
in my dense coif of hair. How do I speak
my regrets? The salmon-pink candle
repeats itself across the room into
your flowering tear ducts. Even you wonder
where you are. I try to translate, your mouth
so close to my ear until the tickle becomes
hard syllables, breaking and churning my thick
whisper back. We are sure to contain the sounds,
the caustic guts that splattered over and
over again, against the windshield, the green
and white film of lover-insect guts
repeating across the wetlands. But now I catch
a word, the only word you repeat,
and push it away,
fearing it will be
the only thing I remember of you.
Mackenzie Carignan is a PhD student at University of Illinois at Chicago where she teaches creative writing and literature classes. Her poetry has been published in Hayden's Ferry Review, The Chaffin Journal, Liberty Hill Poetry Review, Into the Teeth of the Wind, Bluesky Review, Sniper Logic, Square One, and has upcoming publications in Alligator Juniper, Another Chicago Magazine, and RIEN's Evening of Odds. She was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2005 and lives two blocks from Wrigley Field with her husband, Brian and son, Eliot.