Uncanny Projections

(“sunrise_01-02-07” by deb roby is licensed under CC BY 2.0 ) 


I haven’t visited grandma much
but we dance in astral meadows.

Mom calls one day, I’m knee-deep
in books, says grandma is seeing

her father, hearing brackish hymns
in her bedroom where my grandpa

has not slept in months. I do not see
her that night, only lilacs glinting

in a burnt orange sunset. What?
she yells and I hear her from years

away. Mom calls one final time,
grandpa cannot handle her screams

for voices he cannot hear, and I sip
black tea and slumber, meet her

again in the meadows where lilacs
now burn and the sky now weeps

The Price of Glass

(“Experiment 3” by Andy Cardiff licensed under CC BY 2.0 )

My truth hides on the side
of a mirror I have never seen,

wooden, rigid, cutting fractals
of my being like hairs of corn

who fall in the name of pest
–ilence, form an ashen body

that I do not name, stare from
the side of the mirror I cannot

see, ripple through watery glass
until its hay hands cup my face,

warm with freezing tremors
I cannot withstand. I breathe

in each hair, culminate a nest
in the cavity of my left lung,

but do not cough.

Preston Smith is a senior at Bowling Green State University where he studies English Literature. Preston has interned with Mid-American Review and is currently the managing editor of Prairie Margins. He can be found on Twitter (and Instagram!) @psm_writes tweeting about his cats, Helios and Misty, and his love for fairy tales. He has poems published in “The Castle”
(Royal Rose) and forthcoming in Catfish Creek, Pink Plastic House a tiny journal, Nightingale & Sparrow, and Brave Voices Magazine.