Red Cocoa - First Place Poetry

 by Hannah I. Darling

The sight makes her claws come out
and then melt back into their small, pilose coves.

Like the red buttons the neighbor boy
carefully lays on the stepping stones which
lead from his house to ours—
We too, like to be in between worlds.

Her shoulders rise and slink and we
realize we don’t know the fright of crawling
clandestinely and hush hush
in a stranger’s carpeted world.

The boy and his family
(whispering in their foreign accents)
draw hands with chalky dust on
the driveway.

She tracks red inside,
no noise, onto the white white carpet.

They weren’t red buttons.

Next day it snows on the foreign
neighbors’ chalk hands.
So they build snowmen
with reddish snow hearts.

The mother tells me, in her accent,
that the hands they drew
underneath the snow are now
like god’s.
And the snowmen are all the good people.

A cigarette shakes in her menthol lips.
And hot cocoa drips down
her well bitten fingernails.
She pours red into her steaming cup.

Just for “cheer” she says.