jessica cogar
On Ending The Lives Of Frogs
Recoil of a .45, my lip is split by black steel and my father is laughing. I’m in a cathedral and everything here is made of glass. I spit a tooth into my hand
and climb inside the belled stemware.
This is the way to West Virginia, to a town where everyone has my last name. He tells me time moves
backwards when you travel by freeway. He is pulling stitches from his fore arm with his teeth, the same
way he pulls the smoke from a joint as he hangs a row of raccoons by their tails, their mouths hanging open to be cured by the air. My father is laughing.
I swallow my tooth. The carcass of a bullfrog rises to the pond’s surface.
As of 2015: Jessica Cogar is a recent graduate of Ohio Northern University’s undergraduate creative writing program. This fall she starts graduate work in creative writing at Ohio University, where she teaches composition. Her poetry has been published in small po[r]tions, Sun and Sandstone, Cactus Heart, and elsewhere, and is forthcoming in Crab Fat Magazine and Scapegoat Review.