Thrush Poetry Journal
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Anne Barngrover

The Waiting Girl Sweats Out a Fever

After the rain you return to the house
whose drawers fill with mud and fish 

scales. When I talk to women, we walk 
through ragged weeds and pinch 

wild strawberries from stem. They taste
like air. We boil dumplings, sweaty

as hands. When I talk to men, we drink 
whiskey. We drink thundered glass. I want

to throw a bottle against the wall. 
I want to punch somebody in the head. 

I cannot survive the drought this way─
sucking rocks for water, crushing

pine needles into spice, curling in puddled
shade. Without rain the night is polished

as bone. You are the mosquito stinging 
through my poisoned dress. You are cheap 

cloth puckered into dimples, and everyone 
sees. I sleep wet in the scalp and legs. 

I dream that a man dies of thirst in a cave 
and his body becomes a cat’s. His eyes 

are dark as a horse’s and round as stones. 
I press them down, yet they will not close.




Anne Barngrover's first book, Yell Hound Blues, was recently published by Shipwreckt Books, and her chapbook, Candy in Our Brains, co-written with Avni Vyas, is forthcoming with CutBank in the spring. She is currently a PhD student at University of Missouri.




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