Member-only story
Factors
a poem about factors
Thirty-seven cents of change lying on the table
Like spots of rain that sink into the surface
and spread among themselves to make one pattern
that glistens and reflects the light from a face
bent into sharp focus whose breath ripples the image
into fractured colors and arcs of many faces
tinier than the first, still whole, still separate,
still the same
At dusk the horses carry the dead
Across fields in the rain, their hooves
Cutting into the soft ground.
I have watched the old man move eyes
dark as oil over the room
and stop to rest on me,
My face molded into the pupils,
rounded into focus,
floating over the surface,
my face factored whole a million times,
imprinted on cells of blood,
spinning into the lungs,
breathed out and breathed in,
over and over,
as we wait.
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Copyright 2019 Marguerite Floyd all rights reserved
