LITANY WITH CHERRY BLOSSOMS
Seppuku summer, and you cut my hair so short
I pretend I am the boy
my parents want me to be
though I wish I could be nobody
as you sweep the dead ends into the dustbin.
I hide in your cherry tree
until you coax me down
not yet in full bloom.
This is the living
that falls on the grass
already turning brown, the color of
gutted mackerel on our plates.
How easily the flesh falls apart.
Here I lie
in the cradle of branches.
My stomach laid bare
I watch fireworks fall from the sky
red sadness soaking my clothes.
In my heart, the burning.
In my mouth, the taste of smoke.
How I lie
under the moon’s sickle
a cicatrice of light.
You tell me at last, Come inside, it’s getting cold.
After you died, the young couple who bought
your house cut down the cherry tree.
They said it grew too tall. They said
their child fell out of it once.
Funny how I never did.
Funny how I did but never told you.
Funny how pain didn’t matter
compared to the beauty, the solace of being
unseen. Funny how after all the climbing
and falling and climbing again
in the end, they only come and tear down
what they can’t understand.
The fallen fruit spoiled
on the grass that snapped like bone
leaving scars on the earth.
SELF-PORTRAIT AS INVISIBLE GIRL
A December dusk enters
my car and I
drive it north.
I turn up the radio
to graffiti the empty stretches
of pavement full of minus signs.
The DJs have gone home
and left me with comfort noise.
My head weighs heavy
as a black stone left out
too long in the heat.
My legs, birch-white, shiver
like stunted saplings in winter.
Winter. Always, frost runs to flood.
My hands grow numb
lined with green veins
woven into road-cutting crosses
as lights burn
through the paper scenery
leaving scorched ends
and drizzling ashes
down the night’s spilling hair.
I reach Lake Huron.
How did I get here so soon?
The future lies
no more before me
than the past.
Now, there is a beginning-less
and endless passage
of timed intersections
into morning, where I am nothing
but the birds that sing through me.
Jemma Leigh Roe is the author of Running with the Hare, winner of the 2024 Slapering Hol Press Chapbook Competition. Her poems and artwork appear in Sonora Review, Redivider, Fugue, The Journal, Tupelo Quarterly, and Blood Orange Review, among others. She received a PhD in Romance Languages and Literatures from Princeton University.