or winter
and there were nine girls or seven.
Certainly it was overnight church camp
when we formed a second
skin around Lacy
with our fingertips.
What happened wasn’t a dream unless
a mass dream dreamed en masse.
We were one organism,
the skin we made stretched
tautly like a drumhead, lifting
up the girl Lacy, a musical offering.
Our song flowed in and from us,
all seven or nine, with Lacy the melody.
But one of us must have felt an itch
and discovered she was separate
and, doing so, withdrew her touch.
An epidemic followed
from this undoing until Lacy’s body
shared many points
of contact with the floor.
I remember looking under her
just before and noting
her two inches above it all
though of course that is ridiculous
because it wasn’t a dream.
—
Luanne Castle’s Kin Types (Finishing Line), a chapbook of poetry and flash nonfiction, was a finalist for the 2018 Eric Hoffer Award. Her first poetry collection, Doll God (Aldrich), was winner of the 2015 New Mexico-Arizona Book Award. A Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee, she studied at University of California, Riverside (PhD); Western Michigan University (MFA); and Stanford University. Her writing has appeared in Copper Nickel, TAB, Glass, Verse Daily, and other journals.
Zingara Poetry Review 
That gives me goosebumps.
Terrific poem by Luanne. Thanks for featuring her today
Congratulations on these publications! And thanks for suggesting that we follow Zingara. Done! 🙂
Magic!
Congratulations, Luanne! What an interesting poem!
Luanne, you levitated the reader with that poem. Congratulations!
Spookily uplifting
Oh, this sounds so mysterious. I think I could spend hours with this poem 🙂 Congratulations, Luanne!
Wonderful! I did the same thing at school, though I could never write such a lovely poem as yours about the experience. We all became frightened at what was happening and ran away! Our friend crashed to the ground and was very angry with us. Ooops!