Megan Dougherty

BARK

The house on Osage had closets like oceans,
a basement flooded knee-deep to a six-year-old,
fat slugs that floated up through the grates
with the tides.

One spring Mom paid us nickels, twenty each,
for two hours with a mason jar and a
basement full of mollusks.
After, with jars full of sliming lengthening bodies,
we sat on the porch with the salt shaker,
melted tiny feelers, wet underbellies,
pretended we could hear them scream.

The neighbors down the street—the blue-house
neighbors, peeling paint neighbors,
shrieking Ginny's family with all its brothers,
shirtless in the driveway—
had a weeping willow in their yard—a magic tree
with dreadlocks, tentacles, teeth.

We climbed it barefoot while the brothers, tanned
and dirty, grass-stained, shot cap guns
at us and stabbed our feet with sticks.
Our hands were laced red by the
time we reached
the lowest branch, dotted with blood we wiped on
our shirts, licked off our palms, mixed with saliva we
spat to the ground.

That afternoon we found the robin's nest, small
and neat, woven tight with green grass, underfeathers,
twigs and leaves, and Ginny's yellow hair.
We didn't touch the eggs, though their
blue
was whispering past our ponytails, whistling into
our seashell ears. We scrambled to a higher branch to
see more of the speckles, the candyblue, the sky, but
Ginny fell

through the whips and braids, the
squidlimbs of the weeping willow, pulling
tree skin, moss, and spiders down with her.
she lay on her back in the weeds, chest
heaving with near sobs, breathing fire,
and we saw too late the shiny train, the slow slime,
the slippery slug flattened underfoot, already starting
to dry, to become husk, to melt into bark.

Megan Dougherty lives in Indiana.