El Paso New Year
By Susan Muth
I’m shedding you like snakeskin,
wrinkling paper sloughed off
in the afternoon El Paso heat.
I’m in the parking lot of a Circle K, waiting
my turn to order a snow cone from the stand,
all painted in unfurling hibiscus flowers.
I’m walking towards snow-capped peaks,
passing Piggly Wiggly and What-A-Burger
with blue ice dripping from my palm.
I run with your memory hard pressed
against my back like a tempting
recliner, any hesitation, and I’d plummet.
I’m hiking up to see where a plane crashed
70 years ago, finding traction in the gravel,
somehow expecting to find survivors.
Susan Muth is a Pushcart-nominated queer writer from Virginia. She is an MFA poetry candidate at George Mason University. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Chaotic Merge Magazine, Ucity Review, Rejection Letters, The Northern Virginia Review, and others. She is the poetry editor for Phoebe and immediately looks up the IMDB page of any film she is watching.
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