Don’t Bother
By Jessica Barksdale
When you are truly old, you hand over
your aspirations like a packet of meat
carried across five states in the dead
of night, a lump strapped to a lame
horse during a snowstorm. Here, you
might say, take this slab of fatty need
and cook it up for three days in a sizzling
iron pot. I won’t be back for dinner.
Or it is a gerbera daisy in the hot afternoon
sun, flowers baking against the garage —
southern exposure — the incandescent petals
wilted, limp, crispy on the edges. Don’t bother
to water, you might say. I’ve had enough
of that kind of waiting. Or you simply don’t
care as much, not anymore, though you have
one decade, two, maybe three left. You’ve had it
with all that clawing. Look at your ravaged
fingernails, ripped and mooned with dirt.
You’ve done the work, and you want to believe
in your farewell parade, but whatever.
Amylane Reeve, Pine Brook, 2025, mixed media on canvas panel, 8" x 8".
Jessica Barksdale’s seventeenth novel What They Found at the Lake will be published in 2027. She’s published three poetry collections When We Almost Drowned (2018), Grim Honey (2021) and Let’s End This Now (2024). Her short story collection, Trick of the Porch Light, was published in 2023. She teaches fiction for UCLA Extension and in the online MFA program for Southern New Hampshire University. She lives in the Pacific Northwest.
Amylane Reeve (she/her) is a writer, photographer, and illustrator living in Nashville, TN. Her work is largely inspired by personal history and natural phenomena. She loves to greet each morning in the back garden watching birds. It is not uncommon to find Amylane traveling or in the meditative practice of creating her own apparel. Current projects include completing a children's book with mixed media illustrations and writing a memoir about the dozens of locations she has lived in over the past 24 years. She earned a degree in Communications from the University of Maryland and is advancing her creative writing technique through Emory University.