Unleashed

A fevered time. Waves of heat, dread flashes—
the female body’s sheet lightning. 

I’m a remote star on the fade. I run the big fan 
all night and God I love how its breezy fingers 

ply the midnight swelter. Ferry off flushed days. 
Its motor, an elegant crooning thing 

turning darkness around, wings that furrow air. 
By morning I’m bare beneath a blanket, knees bent, 

hands together, a supplicant. The rhythmic 
white whirr has cut the room adrift. Airborne. 

O body, and your seemingly solid hold,  
just a gossamer thread tethers me. 

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Beverly Burch’s third poetry collection, Latter Days of Eve, won the John Ciardi Poetry Prize and will appear in 2019. Her first, Sweet to Burn, won a Lambda Literary Award and the Gival Poetry Prize. Her second, How a Mirage Works, was a finalist for the Audre Lorde Award. Poetry and fiction appear in Denver Quarterly, New England Review, Willow Springs, Salamander, Tinderbox, Mudlark, and Poetry Northwest.