Cherry Cheesman is a writer from the Carolinas. Her work is featured or forthcoming from Bending Genres, Beaver Magazine, and Up the Staircase Quarterly. She is a current undergraduate at Sarah Lawrence College, where she's spending a lot of time getting poems together for her first collection. She really loves peanut butter pie.
looks in the jackal’s mouth and makes sure he can’t
speak. She will not survive if he can. A pleasant absence
hangs over the shared flank steak and strawberries, twin
juice glistening. The jackal paws her hand away from the knife.
His eyes are blank, better for seeing. She’s fallen through the forest like gin
through the river. She’ll press her thumb to her incisor
and pray for the power to summon. She’ll watch herself
stain her breath and blow it to the world.
Several species of wolf slice each other open
to see the smaller wolf inside. She knew she would never
be either. All this to say, when she found the jackal,
she believed she had found a victim. One she could pretend to take.
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