pendant as during

[Poetry, Read Who's Reading You]

I am wearing the pendant you made / blue shimmer, edges worn down / I slip my
finger through the center, curl around the sides / each made for a different sister,
each cut from the same piece of clay, each given different selkie coats of glaze /
oh, what are you creating? / stolen silver chainso the necklace won’t itch / tucked
under a shirt, pressed to a sternum / family, what are we now? / tried to find out
for myself / went searching for a great grandfather in newspaper clippings / tabloid
arrest stories / the article framed by vintage ads for summer dresses, for new mink
fur coats, for trendy silk capes / sensational, stylish, succinct snippets of a past /
family was an unspoken rumor mill / was the chipped edge of my necklace / the
unstable blue / deep ocean / the colossal squid with hand-sewn stitches in its side /
family, I am afraid of breaking this too /

Ally Wehrle (she/her) is a writer from Midcoast Maine currently living in Seattle. Her work has appeared in Cola Literary Review, Porkbelly Press, and the lickety~split. In her free time, you can find her befriending neighborhood cats.