i heard that sandy unzipped by Christine Tierney

i heard that sandy unzipped

her face 

right when she got to ma’s. hung it on the elephant coat hook with the messed-up zirconia eyes in ma’s baby blue vestibule. i heard sandy’s unzipped face 

hung wildly 

on that pachy’s cracked trunk. hissing & jerking, huffing & steaming, even though sandy had warned her unzipped face, fists high & shaking, not to make a frickin’ peep, while she sat with ma on the mohair sofa 

& pretended 

to forgive her. i heard sandy’s unzipped face grouched as ma’s baggy jowls fought with her dementia brain to say what sandy had travelled so far to finally hear; daughter, sorry, love. barely those words, not those words, words replaced 

with muzzy giggles.

maybe sandy forgets how ma use to stash her in the breadbox so dad wouldn’t swear at her, brush the crumbs from her shiny hair, but sandy was always mad. she kicked the dryer for shrinking her pinafores, and scolded that poor elaine doll for blinking. 

i heard 

that sandy described ma’s attempt at conversation as gargled, & i said to the person who told me, how witty of sandy to use such a crafty word, even though i knew she meant to say garbled, or 

something less clever.

it’s hard to see someone altered. ma had spunk. ma was vibrant. now her eyes seem to be melting away like a hunk of chocolate in the microwave, & her hair is greasy, and just not parted right.   

i heard sandy’s 

unzipped face had a full on hissy that day she visited ma. it wriggled free from the hook in the vestibule, plunked its angry little puss down on the sofa, & wailed like a herd of 

tantrumming elephants.

Christine Tierney is a poet, flash fiction writer, digital artist, certified life coach and wannabe comedian. Her first book, chicken+lowercase=fleur was published in 2021 by Lily Poetry Review Books, and her manuscript, make me unsick was selected as a finalist for the 2016 Gambling the Aisle Chapbook Contest, and as a semi-finalist for the 2017 Elyse Wolf Chapbook Contest. She holds a BA in film from Emerson College, and an MFA in creative writing from The University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast Writing Program. Her work has been nominated for Best of the Net, a Pushcart Prize, and the Best New Poets anthology, and has appeared in Permafrost, Poet Lore, The Boiler, Trampoline, The Gravity of the Thing, Sugar House Review, and other fab places. 

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Poems by Dan Sicoli