Mikki Aronoff
LIFT
It’s our birthday month, leaves relinquishing their hold, and I’m thinking back to that rodeo, both of us burning for cowboys and leather, unaware of the suffering of cows, and afterwards, you climbed then tumbled into the bullpen, horns lowered at the clutch and shiver of you, so I doubled over the railing, muscles and blood and brain linked, just like Mr. James taught in Biology, bestowing a strength equal to that bull, and I, finding myself in some new and wondrous state, free of worry and doubt, hoicked you up, you light as a housefly; and today I hear they’ve found you cold on your bathroom tile, and I, too, have found myself old and vulnerable and am left wondering: when it comes my time to crumple, who or what might lean over, limbs outstretched, heave me up.
Mikki Aronoff has work published in Flash Boulevard, New World Writing, MacQueen’s Quinterly, ThimbleLit, The Phare, The Ekphrastic Review, The Fortnightly Review, Milk Candy Review, Tiny Molecules, The Disappointed Housewife, Bending Genres, Gone Lawn, Mslexia, The Dribble Drabble Review, The Citron Review, Atlas and Alice, trampset, jmww, Switch, and elsewhere. Her stories and poems have received Pushcart, Best of the Net, Best Small Fictions, Best American Short Stories, and Best Microfiction nominations.
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