ANGELA VORAS-HILLS
Detour
We'd been expecting snow, but the sky
had hardened and sunk. We locked
the dove's cage.
When the rains came,
we tried to solve the riddle with books.
Boxes of photographs were aging
on our shelves. In the dark,
we couldn't distinguish
who was who, or even who
was living. We heard a baby cry,
though we knew
it didn't exist. Among the images of faces
and landscapes we'd known
was a list of all of the beasts
we'd run over along the way.
You read: raccoon, opossum,
family of skunks... We felt so close
to an answer.
I was burning up inside.
Your mouth had caught fire.
Angela Voras-Hills earned her MFA at UMass-Boston and was a fellow at the Writers' Room of Boston. She has been awarded grants from The Sustainable Arts Foundation and the Key West Literary Seminar. Other poems have appeared in Kenyon Review Online, Memorious, Best New Poets, and Hayden's Ferry Review, among other journals and anthologies. She currently lives with her family in Madison, WI, where she is working with a group of writers to establishing a literary arts center. (www.angelavorashills.com )