Illinoise Gothic
When you dissolved
into the white expanse
of silence, they kept telling me
you had gone to the silo
that stored our nightmares,
story after story,
on the unblinking plain.
Through the rippling rye
to be threshed at dawn,
I raced against the tornado
swallowing whole fence posts,
pickup trucks, livestock, sod,
screeching words unutterable.
Beyond the state limits
on a night of no sound, I
found your bracelet
caught between the barbed wire:
a gibbet for all that remained of you
I could keep safe.
Jemma Leigh Roe studied art at the Université Paris-Sorbonne and received a PhD in Romance Languages and Literatures from Princeton University. Her poems and artwork are featured or forthcoming in The Ilanot Review, Thin Air Magazine, Literary North, Canyon Voices, Feral: A Journal of Poetry and Art, and others. www.jemmaleighroe.com. Instagram: @jemleighroe.
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