Hard Truths

I.

How cold were the waters when you shouted to get out?
You needed a lakeside sweater so the children must be shivering
as they thundered their own storms into turbulent mud.
The children swam away from your chilly insistence
into the murk and mayhem of unbridgeable waters
and never again found their way home.

II.

The space where an untold story might erupt
or creep or flay or touch a match to all the
gilded meals around a corpulent homefire
is love.

III.

None of this is real. Your hand in the hosiery,
blunt nails straining the taupe, the gauzy
indifference, the night sky pumping what
might have been wonder.

IV.

Enchantments abound, in sticks and stones and
sufferable names, in payoffs in governable beaux
if knees are kept pressed peachily together beneath

pleats that knife devoutly below them, in beds
that are hastily made with blood and bracken and
monstrous tongues of yammering moonlight

that one still has to, desperately, lie in.

V.

Time heals all wounds.

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Kate Falvey's work has been published in many journals and anthologies including three previous issues of the NonBinary Review; in a full-length collection, The Language of Little Girls (David Robert Books); and in two chapbooks, What the Sea Washes Up (Dancing Girl Press) and Morning Constitutional in Sunhat and Bolero (Green Fuse Poetic Arts). She co-founded (with Monique Ferrell) and for ten years edited the 2 Bridges Review, published through City Tech (City University of New York) where she teaches, and is an associate editor for the Bellevue Literary Review.