by Isabelle Ylo
My ex-boyfriend and I used to work on puzzles together,
assembling the townspeople
piece by piece, an elbow here, a flash of skin at the wrist there.
He’d put together the shepherd dog trailing the apricot-faced
farmer boy,
the mustached milkman in the blue wagon, while I hunted for
the woman in a straw hat and starch-stiff dress, the man
selling sunflowers
and the woman buying them, the brick-walled storefronts
behind them glowing golden out the windows, while
in our apartment
the A.C. unit blasted in muggy mid-July, groaning and
rattling along the wall, our glasses of homemade lemonade
sweating and dripping
onto the coffee table, there we were an ordinary couple
unwilling or unable to admit we were dead in the water,
sun-bleached and rotting
like the fish Angelo caught at Roundup Lake, when
the glittery lure hooked deeper than he intended,
those brutal minutes
digging out the hook from that struggling, writhing body,
but when he released it back into the water it was too late,
floating belly-up away from us,
and his hands covered in blood and shaking, the whole boat
bloodied: the seats, the cooler, the bow, all night long
he kept saying
I didn’t mean to hurt it like that, I didn’t mean
Isabelle Ylo resides in the suburbs of Chicago, Illinois. Her work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Beaver Magazine, Meniscus, Rappahannock Review, Salt Hill Journal, Santa Clara Review, and more.
Emerge Literary Journal 