A consternation of friends
chase the moon down
a street with stout-hearted merriment.
A constellation of rapt stars
watch their coterminous performance
contented in giggliest giggles.
A contestation of signals
the moan of an emergency vehicle
poleaxes the night with grievous grief.
A tight contest of context-specific elements
a baby cries through the thin veil of a partially-clouded window,
a woman places down a phone she will later throw across her anguish,
a man fondles his ill-gotten gains and smokes his extinguished dreams,
a teen searches for the correct consonant to mute his pain,
a patient survives another night while tired eyes scoop the sunrise from a low sill,
a mother portends planetary disaster and a hard winter,
a father flips a potato cake and feels the love it contains as if it were a girdle.
Catherine O’Brien is an Irish writer of poems, flash fiction and short stories. Her work has most recently appeared in Ghost Parachute, BULL, X-R-A-Y, Frazzled Lit Magazine, Irish Country Magazine, Washing Windows V and Bending Genres. You can find out more on X @abairrud2021 and Bluesky catherineobrien.bsky.social.
More work by Catherine O'Brien
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