Slow Heat

High strung
They called her

Unsettled
We come home
She’d clawed her a notch 
Jerked the planks right out
Said the witch needed her.
Ginseng they said
Ease the hippo
Help her sleep
Start slow
Build the dose
None of us knew
What it would take
To smother her.

Tina Parker’s new poetry collection will be published in late fall 2020. She is the author of the poetry chapbook Another Offering and the full-length poetry collection Mother May I. Her work has received support from the Kentucky Foundation for Women and has appeared in Still: The Journal, Pen+Brush, Rattle, Literary Mama, and PMS: poemmemoirstory.

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