One Poem by Mikki Aronoff

 

In Which I Visit the Goddess Henwen of Wales for a Psychic Reading

 

She’s a pig like no other — not a cousin to Wilbur, not

your dry rub ribs at Rosie’s or your flying porker statue

 

in a riverbank park confessing that your hometown

once slaughtered pigs but now tries to rise above it.

 

Henwen. Divine old sow who birthed a dispersal of corn

wheat and barley. Bees. A cat, unsheathed. Beech nuts

 

seed her with wisdom, a way to read the Future.

Present, too — she’s aware I’ve been unkind and don’t

 

know how to fix it. Henwen pities me trapped in my dark

forest, coaxes me to snuffle and grunt, to root for nuts

 

so that I might find the words to write my terrible wrong.

I rummage deeper in the dank, unearth this apology.

first published in The Gyroscope Review (Fall, 2020)

Mikki Aronoff’s work appears or is forthcoming in The Ekphrastic Review, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Intima, Thimble Literary Magazine, London Reader, SurVision, Rogue Agent, Popshot Quarterly, The South Shore Review, The Fortnightly Review, Feral, The Phare, Milk Candy Review, Flash Boulevard, New World Writing, Emerge, The Disappointed Housewife, Tiny Molecules, Microfiction Monday Magazine, Potato Soup Journal, RubyLit, Bending Genres, Gone Lawn, Mslexia, and elsewhere. Her stories and poems have received Pushcart and Best Microfiction nominations.