She couldn’t understand it, but her resentment of his drinking became a chalice. Each time he neglected their children it would appear in her hand painted with more gold. Is this a curse? The bubbled ruby red glass of the chalice was as dark as blood. Made the sound of her teeth grinding. She tried smashing it into pavement. It only bounced back as high as their son’s super ball. The chalice filled with her fat. The weight she gained from being too afraid to leave the children alone with him. Once she thought forgiveness might empty her hands. When she tried, all the trees laughed and threw their branches at her. She saw the birds terrified. Burst into the sky. Then she thought to fill the chalice with poison. Leached from the mud at the junkyard. Rainbows of oil. Mercury and heavy metal. Walls moved around the chalice. Wavered in the air like a mirage. What she hadn’t seen was his cup. How the liquid inside held him in an embrace solid as marriage. His whiskey mistress.

Jessica Purdy

holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Emerson College. Her poems and microfiction have appeared in Gargoyle, Gone Lawn, Litro, ONE ART, Radar, The Ekphrastic Review, The Night Heron Barks, and numerous others. Her books Starland (2017) and Sleep in a Strange House (2018) were both released by Nixes Mate Books.

Her recent chapbooks include You’re Never the Same: Ekphrastic Poems (Seven Kitchens Press, 2023); and The Adorable Knife (Grey Book Press, 2023), poems based on dollhouse-scale dioramas by forensic scientist Frances Glessner Lee which were collected in Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death and used to train homicide investigators.

For a longer list of other publications, plus a portfolio excerpted from The Adorable Knife and published by Buttonhook Press in 2022, Murder in the House: The “Nutshells” of Frances Glessner Lee, visit the author’s website:

www.jessicapurdy.com