Honorable Mention for the 2021 Small Orange Emerging Woman Poet Honor

Porch Light

I was the first to visit in remission, to hold still

his hand until the music dwindled to a low

insect whine. Carnations and stargazer lilies

lay still throughout the house, their petals

the dark bruises of junkies, their tongues

a thousand of his when he let fall to his porch

a mouthful of bile and it shimmered there

under the light. His quiet said, I owe you

nothing, and I did nothing, as if to say

I know, or I forgive you, or soon you will

know the mystery of my heart, et cetera.

Each word an arrow sharpened toward

no mystery. Each a pang of knowing 

the yearning to hear my name in his mouth 

was a loud, dogged thing. A hunger 

of a furnace, old and empty of coal.

Emily Kingery teaches courses in literature, writing, and linguistics at a small university in Iowa. Her work appears or is forthcoming in multiple journals, including Birdcoat Quarterly, CutBank, Eastern Iowa Review, GASHER, Gingerbread House, Midwest Review, New South, Quarter After Eight, and Trampoline, among others, and she has been both a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee as well as first runner-up in the 2020 Robert J. DeMott Short Prose Contest, judged by Dinty W. Moore. She serves on the Board of Directors at the Midwest Writing Center, a non-profit organization that supports writers in the Quad Cities community.