Couldn’t see the moon til the damn barn burned down. Ooze of light beaming milky silver over the bed’s leftover sheets – like strips of a tattered slip, or ribbons stitched to pointé shoes spinning in soot. Ash clung to the walls, seen best in the residual lack of darkness after a fingertip strokes the hips of the rafters. The bones clung to solidity. We took a canister and burned them too, made sure nothing was left behind, we wanted to shine so bright, wanted some part of us, after all, to wind up living.
Paige Ellen Passantino (she/hers) is an MFA candidate in poetry at Johns Hopkins University, where she teaches creative writing. She earned her BA in English Literature from Smith College as an Ada Comstock Scholar. Her work appears on Poets.org and in The Florida Review, SHŌ Journal, and is forthcoming in Folio, among others. She is a nominee for 2025 Best of the Net, was an honoree for the 2023 Adroit Prize, and her work has been supported by Tin House. She is currently working on her debut collection of poems, a memoir, and a novel about clowns.