Gary reads coffee grounds, grows three-leaf clovers, and carries an unlucky rabbit’s ear. Each night, she makes wishes on a Fed-Ex cargo plane twinkling in the dark. She knows one’s company, two’s a crowd, and that all the Queen’s ladies couldn’t put love together again, couldn’t even rest their big bottoms on that skinny-ass wall. Her mother named her Gary after Indiana, and because Gary rhymes with contrary, and Mary sounded religious, and Harry is just too weird a name for a girl. Gary grew up a lonesome dove on a hot desert highway, spent the early years on the lookout for a Paul Bunyan/ Mike Brady kind of guy— tall, strong, larger than life but safe as a 70s sitcom. Truth told, she was looking for Daddy in all the wrong places. Come Thursday, Gary left off searching, found Jesus— not the man or the son of God, but Jesus the stray dog— and she knew her soulmate when she saw him. It was Jesus that caught that unlucky rabbit, gnawed off its ear and brought it to Gary, and for that sweet, simple act of violence she was grateful. In the coffee grounds, she sees a bright future, and the night sky ablaze with next day deliveries.

March 7, 2024

About the writer

Ann Weil is the author of Lifecycle of a Beautiful Woman (Yellow Arrow Publishing, 2023) and Blue Dog Road Trip (forthcoming from Gnashing Teeth Publishing, October 2024). Her poetry has been twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net and appears in Pedestal Magazine, DMQ Review, Maudlin House, 3Elements Review, Okay Donkey, SWWIM Every Day, and elsewhere. She lives in Ann Arbor, MI, and Key West, FL. Visit www.annweilpoetry.com to read more of her work.