Signs from Heaven

The girl in the book with the scent library, the violet-white gleam 
of a nighttime thing, the dormant tulip,

the tree-stump pulpit, how when houseboats are built, they start 
with the stairs, the trembling suitor extending a bouquet 

of yellow daffodils. The people working hard to preserve 
antique apples, the squirrels working hard 

to collect their acorns, the oak trees that follow the ones
too well-hidden. The half-song I whisper 

to the pearl moon. The knowing. The kind of prickle that goes up 
your arm and says Daddy’s coming home with a belly full 

of vodka. It may be violet, olive, burnt orange, iridescent—
the clacking seaworm inside me. Coaxing wild peacocks 

from the bedroom, glee filling the hollow place, how horses 
can hear a human heartbeat from four feet away. I’ve worked so hard

to collect my acorns this year, I may forget where I’ve buried them.
Nancy Drew in her mother’s blue convertible. Cold creek water

on my tongue. The blessings in my fears, the shadow of myself 
I can dip into now and not scold. Cinder-spit

from my great unseen fire.

MEGAN DENTON

Megan Denton is the author of Mustard, Milk, and Gin, winner of the 2019 New Southern Voices Poetry Prize (Hub City Press, 2020). She holds an MFA from Purdue University. Her work has appeared recently or is forthcoming in POETRY, The Adroit Journal, Sixth Finch, Passages North, and elsewhere. She currently lives and teaches in North Carolina.