BRENDA SIECZKOWSKI is completing (at a snail’s pace) her PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Utah while taking time off from academia to work with homeless and at-risk youth. Her poems and lyric essays have appeared widely in print and on-line journals, including The Colorado Review, Versal, The New England Review, Diagram, The Florida Review, Gulf Coast, Poet Lore, Sidebrow, and Subtropics among others. Currently, she lives, works, and writes in Omaha, Nebraska.
On the Porch
Yomi sips powdered lemonade and blows back a miniature cloud of gnats. Though in her mother’s model pioneer village it would have registered as an onslaught of locust proportions. A red car passes. Then a brown. She tunes her buzzy ribbon of brain noise in and out. Yomi spent the summer of her tenth year recording license plates along with the exact time and location of each sighting. (She had a digital watch). 1-CH356—4:38:25—60th and Underwood. Say the person in that random vehicle drove off into a sunset of crime, Yomi would be the girl providing valuable testimony. Only she doesn’t know any more if all crimes should really be prosecuted. Or which.
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