Out of Place
by Sophia Vesely
Ten years passed,
I asked my grandmother
what happened to the swans.
The two of them
we always fed,
in the pond behind her house.
The water parted in two parallel lines:
they glided together or not at all.
They never left the cattails’ homely confines,
never gave an audible squall.
My childishness
approved only
of their form of kissing:
the creation of a heart,
like the one I dotted my i’s with.
She told me one was eaten
on a winter’s night
by the neighborhood coyote.
The guts, shredded and strewn,
pulsed purple on the lawn.
And the other journeyed to the
forest in an awkward
stumble, grace was never
built for
twisted roots and
cracked soil.
She said it was
to seek revenge,
but I know better.
It was the grandest gesture of lost hope--
because for him,
there was no longer such a thing as
comfort.
I asked my grandmother
what happened to the swans.
The two of them
we always fed,
in the pond behind her house.
The water parted in two parallel lines:
they glided together or not at all.
They never left the cattails’ homely confines,
never gave an audible squall.
My childishness
approved only
of their form of kissing:
the creation of a heart,
like the one I dotted my i’s with.
She told me one was eaten
on a winter’s night
by the neighborhood coyote.
The guts, shredded and strewn,
pulsed purple on the lawn.
And the other journeyed to the
forest in an awkward
stumble, grace was never
built for
twisted roots and
cracked soil.
She said it was
to seek revenge,
but I know better.
It was the grandest gesture of lost hope--
because for him,
there was no longer such a thing as
comfort.
Sophia Vesely is a nineteen-year-old from St. Petersburg, Florida. She is currently taking a gap year before her matriculation to Swarthmore College in the fall of 2021. Her poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in W-Poesis, The Bitchin’ Kitsch, The Fiction Week Literary Review, The Blue Marble Review, Writer’s Egg Magazine, and more. She also has a published poetry collection on amazon.com entitled “The Road to Amour de Soi” that explores the complexities of first loves and heartbreak in order to empower young women through the notion of self-love.