Misti Vaughn
Your blonde barbie-doll hair attached to
white skull and tied by pink ribbons searches
for meaning in the decaying breeze. We hide from trickster coyotes and mean women, and burn our feet into solid black and run into convenient stores to grab shirtfulls of ice. This is summer against my stomach; cold and damning as the water soothes the grass we sit on, drowning ant piles with small icebergs just to watch hysteria in the boiling sun.
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Misti Vaughn is the Assistant Director of the nonprofit organization The American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology. Her poems have recently been published in the Santa Fe Writer’s Project and Bravura Literary Journal. She is the two-time recipient of the Angelo Carli Poetry Prize. She’s a South Texan living in Encinitas, California.