Night with a Cloud of Mosquitoes
We wore blue lanyards, called ourselves The Texans.
Screws and spiders held the bunk together.
Danish-Blonde had a mini-skirt
like a dip and a dream boat.
While I sang I’m a Believer
the swing set collapsed in slow motion.
Amy threw a photo into the campfire
with the gesture of a bat leaving her roost.
Creek rustled her dark green dress,
raccoons slipped into their uniforms.
Since no one in True Confessions was twelve,
we proceeded with no moral compass.
A convict with a metal hand ranged our dreams.
White geese guarded the path to the boys’ camp.
Behind the cookhouse, we licked globs of orange sherbet
pried out of the stolen vat with a stick.
The moon grinned. Birds snickered
at our tongues dyed the orange of gooses’ bills.
Roberta Feins received her MFA in poetry from New England College, where she studied with Judith Hall, DA Powell, Carol Frost, and Alicia Ostriker. Her poems have appeared in various publications, including Five AM, Antioch Review, Cortland Review, and The Gettysburg Review, among others. She has published two chapbooks: Something Like a River (Moon Path Press) and Herald (Autumn House Press), which won the 2016 Coal Hill Review Chapbook Prize. Her first full-length collection, A Morsel of Bread, A Knife, was published in 2018 by the Center on Contemporary Art, Seattle.
