McKayla Conahan
When you’re drowning in nitrous,
the nurses hold your head down
by the mask and ask is she laughing
or crying? When you’re screaming,
and when you forget you remember
how they take your hand, or how
your mother counts backwards as they
struggle to unearth your veins,
you’re taken back to the end of spring
or some day in summer when you
move away from the crepe myrtles that
confetti the yard. When you still think
you’ll always be able to count on
that sweet spring snow blushing over
San Antonio or the cascarones smashed
over your classmates’ heads, you’re
in kindergarten and sometimes kids
mistake the jellybeans spilled in the
grass for tiny easter eggs. Sometimes
you tell the teacher about the true
uncertainty of the sunrise, how one day
it will be emptied, the way you love
to brush the seeds out of the sunflowers
in your mother’s garden at the end of
summer, each little black pod containing
another flower containing hundreds more
seeds with flowers inside. When our
flower is mined, husk tossed aside, when
we are left with the aftermath, like a child
after the doctors mine her throat for tonsils,
know there won’t be mothers for every
sleepless daughter, to comb fingers through
her hair, to tell her about all the numbers
that come before one hundred, ninety nine,
ninety eight, ninety seven
Return to Fall 2018 Volume 10.1
MCKAYLA CONAHAN is a queer non-binary poet, drag king, and MFA candidate at Virginia Commonwealth University. They were raised in South Carolina and received a degree in Astronomy from the College of Charleston. They have been published in Sweet, Rabbit Poetry, Sink Hollow, Miscellany, and have been awarded the South Carolina Academy of Authors Student Poetry Prize. They currently reside in Richmond with their Australian Shepherd, Nanuk.