Wendy Wisner

Reading the News

If you tell me the story of the girl
shot twice in the back by her father,
I’ll walk into this August night,

crickets chirping against my earlobes,
until they stop, just like that,
because I told them to.

I’ll find the crows and pinch
their beaks between my fingers.
I’ll make it so no one

can speak for her without
permission. The moon won’t
follow us as she does in the other stories.

We won’t get lost in the woods.
Instead we’ll sleep,
the two of us, like sisters,

the silver breath of egrets
like knives against our throats.

Wendy Wisner is the author of two books of poems, Epicenter and Morph and Bloom. Her essays and poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Spoon River Review, Passages North, Tar River Poetry, Nashville Review, The Washington Post, Full Grown People, The Manifest-Station, Lilith Magazine, and elsewhere. She lives in New York with her husband and two kids.