Abel is Found

This far out in the field grass is weak and the weeds are strong but just as yellow and crackle just as readily beneath her feet. The afternoon sun laves at any skin she hasn’t hidden and sighs into her scalp. Her sweat raises and evaporates like ants crawling to the surface of tilled sand.

A dry chill has washed over her and the prayer she should be moaning has caught heavy in her throat, pulsing and chapped and itching to break. This prayer is too thick to swallow down, too harsh to cough up, hurting like stubborn birth. Her lips collapse into her mouth and offer no sound as they shine and shake. Her tongue is a grainy carcass buried damp behind her teeth.

Head bent to the mound of freshly turned earth her eyes sear as the weeping begins, and her lashes catch in the wet like a fly’s legs. Her arms wrap around herself, barely holding her like a broken crib, like a crib that has been broken into. Heart tugging to Heaven, she feels naked again as she heaves in breaths too full for her rib to fit safely. Her bones have become too delicate to embrace her, and at last she screams because nothing was supposed to burn like being wrenched from Eden.

---

Arielle K. Jones is a QWOC writer from the Central Valley of California. She has been a reader/editor for The Normal School as well as the Philip Levine Poetry Prize. She has work published and upcoming with The Rumpus and Blood Orange Review.