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issue 6: FAIRYTALE

spinning wheels
are so out of style

PRESTON SMITH
             After “ Belladonna ” by Ava Max

We’ll build one last snowman
before winter’s dance beat peters
out, shadows elongated in shortened
night, a sandman at bay

until you watch our snowman melt
and I flee to my childhood garden.
I find things are growing here now but I
only remember that body temps drop

when drinking and that curses grow, too.
I wade through watered flowerbeds
like the gentlest of fairies, pick perfect
parcels of poison which seem to cry
​
as their stems snap out of spring’s new soil.
I’ll tell him I steeped tea, that it’s spiked
and I’ll tell him I’m sorry it took me
so long to water the flowers.

Preston Smith (he/him) is an MA candidate in literature and an editor for Periwinkle Literary Journal, and his debut chapbook Red Rover, Red Lover released in 2020. He is on Twitter (and Instagram!) @psm_writes. His poems appear in Black Bough Poetry, Nightingale & Sparrow, and Pink Plastic House, among others. 
perhappened mag
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header photo: taisiia stupak (unsplash)

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