The Sweet-Bitter by Emily Rosko


 
 
The list of wants lengthened. Though, for a while, I didn’t need you
anymore. Seasons shifted from the passive arid blue sky to the tropical
congestions of heavy-bellied clouds. The heat of summer collapsed a onehundred-
year-old tree. The root ball resembled a medusa head. I did
much to nothing away your tongue to its muscle use. Wasps burrowed
into the fig blossoms, forcing conception. And then, as one might have
expected, the real dying set in.
 
 
 
Emily Rosko is the author of Weather Inventions (University of Akron Press, forthcoming 2018), Prop Rockery (U Akron P 2012), and Raw Goods Inventory (U Iowa Press, 2006). Recent poems appear in Epoch, Crab Orchard Review, and West Branch. She is the editor of A Broken Thing: Poets on the Line (U Iowa P 2011) and poetry editor for Crazyhorse. She teaches at the College of Charleston.