This is Where We Split
My head breaks the surface for a drink of air, and I see them:
my stepsons coming into my water like divorce-sized bombs.
Your voices, air-raid sirens, surround me.
Your group of teenage boys swarm the mid-lake boulder:
pimpled, hairless chests, too-red lips like vinegary ketchup kisses.
They look just like you.
I swim out to the middle, where the water makes me stretch,
my limbs worming through boat waves.
There’s nothing left for me to do, so
I sink.
The thousands of tiny hairs on my unshaved legs
begin to crawl along the lake bottom
like little hands not mine
like little brains, not mine.
It happens here, the split:
I am a centipede.
My body curls into bait.
What eats a centipede?
Do fifty-year-old men, former husbands, fathers?
As I always have, I feel my own grotesqueness
reflected in the slink of your shoulders,
the evolutionary dip of your brow, how
you stopped trying to suck in your gut. It doesn't matter, not
for a centipede.
But what if I went all the way?
Unfurl my own stomach, let my used and
pointed tits scrape the sandy bottom.
Slip out of the polka dotted two-piece.
Pluck the long, greyed hairs on my head,
the curled ones on my pubic bone, the lashes
pronged by water droplets. Swim,
barren at last, in the mess
of myself. Drink
in microbes, gulp
phytoplankton, swipe
algae like a fifty-dollar lip-gloss. Really relish it.
Become millipede.
Crawl faster. Move
without movement. You
wouldn't even
feel me
on the tip
of your finger.
Roadside Sage
I have become accustomed to the
whisper of the broomsedge grasses.
My petals, bruise-purple and
violently bright amidst
their crowd of blended brown—
I do not blame the grasses for their envy.
As expected, the whiskers of a passing Tom bend
at the might of my tubed flower.
Nearby, a field mouse flits; the Tom follows.
I watch their play through vibrations
that touch my roots. My feeders
tingle. Then, without warning:
thunder in the underground
rocks. Diesel in the wind.
The blades come for me as though
I am some common weed.
His death scythe slashes my sisters:
long fleabane timbered,
wild daisies like risen cobra heads, decapitated,
plumed dandelions like meteors, felled to Earth,
crawling wild geranium, deadened
beneath his tread.
Before nightfall, moon tilts
her receding face at our cut stems,
laid in a common grave with
agonizingly silent broomsedge.
We will be wilted before morning.
In the dark, the Tom returns.
The field mouse does not.
Below, my roots, like veins
throb at the life in his wake.
Stacey Lounsberry is a prose reader at the upcoming literary magazine Broad Ripple Review, and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Bright Flash Literary Review, Heavy Feather Review, Liminal Spaces, Appalachian Places, SBLAAM and others. Her flash fiction, “The Bet,” (first published by The Mersey Review) is a 2025 Best of the Net nominee. She is a full-time mother and writer and holds a BFA in Creative Writing and an MAT in Special Education. Find her in Eastern Kentucky or online at www.sglounsberry.com.
January House Literary Journal 
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