Not the Kind that You Could Keep
Sally Rosen Kindred
Celestial Comedown
Thad DeVassie
He tells me when our mother died, lightning
struck his car. Not when he was there. He went out
to the lot to find all four windows half-down
and a half-inch of water in the seats. All four,
he doesn’t say, like the four of us there were
before she died. Lightning
struck and he was left with a mess and nowhere
to sit down: a cold rain, but inside.
That made him stop driving–he didn’t really drive that fall. I know
he did–the grocery store, the CVS–but I get
the message. She was the message. She was the blitzed
secret weather. Had power. The kind
that, fingerless, moved sheets of glass and water, that cracked open
a silver beast machine and said she
was there. The kind that scared your skin into awe and made it hard
to move. That you’d never get anyone to believe.
Sally Rosen Kindred's third full-length collection is Where the Wolf (Diode Editions, 2021), winner of the Diode Prize and the Julie Suk Award. She is the recipient of two Individual Artist Awards from the Maryland State Arts Council, and her work has appeared in journals including Shenandoah, Alaska Quarterly Review, Image, and Kenyon Review Online. Find Sally on Facebook, Instagram, and BlueSky.
Thad DeVassie is a writer and artist/painter from Ohio. He is the author three chapbooks and was awarded the James Tate Poetry Prize (SurVision Books). His work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, Best Microfiction, and appears in Best Small Fictions 2025. His artwork has appeared in galleries, private collections, and more recently in literary journals including Salt Hill, Phoebe, Bat City Review, The Dodge, and New Ohio Review. Find more of his creative output at www.thaddevassie.com.