The dog knew first. She would
sleep by the spot for hours on end.
After a few days, we would start
to smell it, too. A sickly sweet musk.
Thick. Unrelenting. My mother
quickly learned that air freshener
only made it worse. We all lost
weight that summer except for
my sister, who stopped eating
at home the day she got her license.
She doesn’t really remember
what our house smelled like
the summer before Dad finally
relapsed, before Mom kicked him
out, before anyone noticed
my accidents weren’t all
accidental; that summer
when the rats died in our walls.
Ellie White holds a BA in English from The Ohio State University, and is an MFA candidate at Old Dominion University. Her poems have been published in FreezeRay Poetry and Wicked Banshee Press. Ellie currently lives among mermaids in Norfolk, Virginia.
Categories: Mental Health, Poetry, Themed
Tags: e-zine, Ellie White, ezine, hyperbole, longing, melancholy, melancholy hyperbole, Mental Health, new, poem, poet, poetry, poets, submit, Tiny Deaths, writing
Melancholy Hyperbole 