Aurora Brackett
Sabbath
Every week
she carried her mother’s hair
in her hand like a bird.
Brown in the morning
red by the evening,
just in time for God.
The girl held the wig in one hand,
brushed it with the other.
There, there,
she whispered,
smelling bitter wax,
her mother’s ear.
Petting the back of her head,
the thick of her back,
stepping on cracks,
the evening prayer
(Hear Me, Oh Israel)
already begun.
Aurora Brackett lives in Las Vegas, Nevada where she is a PhD fellow in fiction at University of Nevada, Las Vegas’ Black Mountain Institute. She is a recipient of the San Francisco Browning Society’s Dramatic Monologue Award, the Wilner Award for Short Fiction and a nominee for The Pushcart Prize. Her work has appeared in Nimrod Quarterly, Eleven Eleven, The Portland Review, Fourteen Hills and other magazines. She is currently fiction editor of Witness Magazine and was associate editor of Hope Deferred: Narratives of Zimbabwean Lives published by Voice of Witness/McSweeney's in 2010.
Return to March 2014 Edition
Every week
she carried her mother’s hair
in her hand like a bird.
Brown in the morning
red by the evening,
just in time for God.
The girl held the wig in one hand,
brushed it with the other.
There, there,
she whispered,
smelling bitter wax,
her mother’s ear.
Petting the back of her head,
the thick of her back,
stepping on cracks,
the evening prayer
(Hear Me, Oh Israel)
already begun.
Aurora Brackett lives in Las Vegas, Nevada where she is a PhD fellow in fiction at University of Nevada, Las Vegas’ Black Mountain Institute. She is a recipient of the San Francisco Browning Society’s Dramatic Monologue Award, the Wilner Award for Short Fiction and a nominee for The Pushcart Prize. Her work has appeared in Nimrod Quarterly, Eleven Eleven, The Portland Review, Fourteen Hills and other magazines. She is currently fiction editor of Witness Magazine and was associate editor of Hope Deferred: Narratives of Zimbabwean Lives published by Voice of Witness/McSweeney's in 2010.
Return to March 2014 Edition