Shannon Hardwick
You project a phantasmal image of a creature’s worst fears
It’s almost time
to wake, my dead mother’s voice
says.
I leave the house at suppertime,
toward fields & rows of
stalls. The car won’t
start, so
I walk past
homes where children
sleep, or
are going to
sleep.
It’s almost time to
go to sleep, as if
the world she left would keep
its evening routine.
Your mare has died,
she says. As if I wasn’t
expecting this. Good,
I think. I will
need her.
This side quest
is taking too long.
Shannon Hardwick reads “You project a phantasmal image of a creature’s worst fears”
Shannon Hardwick’s work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Gulf Coast Journal, Salamander, South Dakota Review, Plume Poetry Journal, The Texas Observer, Four Way Review, The Missouri Review, Sixth Finch, and Passages North, among others.