Chronophobia

Laura Z. Fargrieve


The table was a constellation of lost knives
and my fear was a nine-legged horse

Needles of rosemary whickered and a thousand
mornings spent slumped over chipped mugs 
were left as shadow sighs on the cedarwood

The table was a constellation of lost knives
and my fear was a nine-legged horse

The knots were punctuation marks and the
cleaver, the boning, the sheep’s foot paring
spelled run, or nation
and with reflections swimming in the dustless plain
and the benches on each side, it was all the same

The window rolled shut, the flies on the ledge guillotined
and now my fear had no heartbeat and its
last act was to settle inside of me, it
folded its legs in the pit of my stomach. 

91ÊÓƵ the Author

Laura Fairgrieve received her MFA from Adelphi University. She is a winner of the Poets & Writers 2016 Amy Award. Her work appears in the anthology Women of Resistance: Poems for a New Feminism. Her poems also appear in Banyan Review, Arkana Magazine, Sublunary Review, Ink in Thirds, Underwater New York, Mortar Magazine, The Bitchin’ Kitsch, and Inscape Magazine, among others. She lives in New York.