To get to you I bit the apple

at its loveliest spot, drawing the poison

out and into me. I lay in my glass box,

neither sleeping nor swooning, neither

half empty nor half full, every nerve

edged in black like a mourning letter.

What the doves call song I call grief; but

I waited.

                 Your charger found me first,

nosing at my coffin, transformed

from battle steed to foal by the scent

of apples. You swung the hinged lid

slowly: one last moment to fear

my heart’s desire, all my new kingdom

in your kiss.

—

Laura Cherry is the author of the collection Haunts (Cooper Dillon Books) and the chapbooks Two White Beds (Minerva Rising) and What We Planted (Providence Athenaeum). She co-edited the anthology Poem, Revised (Marion Street Press). Her work has been published in journals including Clementine Poetry Journal, Los Angeles Review, Cider Press Review, and Hartskill Review.