Making Bones

I watch and sweat in the shadows
of a rust-covered warehouse
while Vinny Marino whispers
under the curl of a tan fedora
that hides the face of Cuba's
most wanted.

Paused between enemies
a handshake;
a single alliance keeping guns
and men
from consuming each other
in their thirst for foe s blood.

I feel myself shaking
in time with the cadence of the waves
that crash on the dock outside;
I look out the broken window behind me
and wonder how many bodies
have been dumped off the side.

I turn to glimpse Vinny s red satin shirt
disappear behind white cotton pants
as they float up the stairs of a Greyhound bus
through the haze of summer around them.
The door is pulled closed

my ears are ringing with the sound of clips
clicking, guns cocked and ready
like a scene in a silent movie;
men are screaming, flailing, falling
to an operatic aria; a sad but lovely,
bloody battle cry.

I creep through crimson puddles
and bodies
collecting money, clips and guns;
and as the men lay moaning, leaking
more come to drag them out the door;
to load them
where our luggage should be.

Before Celexa

A single white sailboat
wandered along the horizon
in the distance

and I picked at the label
on the Evian bottle
in my lap

while I imagined what
it would be like if
whales could fly;

if mid-jump they could
take off over the foam,
tickling the surface with their
tails;

their wailing
would sound so different
in the open air

like how Autumn s cry
sounds so amber,
though I had imagined it gold.

I heard Lucia enter the nursery
to soothe the screaming
that ripped through
my ears

I sat staring,
rolling and re-rolling
the label in my hands;

preoccupied by the possibility
for those tired, white sails
to be given

the opportunity
by the north wind himself

to smother
the pure, nascent bow.

Jacky Curran is an undergraduate at Eastern Connecticut State University studying communication with minors in spanish and writing. These are her first written works to be published. She currently resides in Connecticut but is originally from New York and Texas.

Email: Jacky Curran

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