​What Is the Remedy? by Kyle Laws

They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (still photograph) by Sidney Pollack, director and Philip H. Lathrop, cinematographer (USA) 1969

​What Is the Remedy?
  
Air charged with electricity
lightning absorbed in the space 
between oaks and cedars and pines
on Fulling Mill Road
after the movie They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?
 
Atlantic City in the Depression
where for a cash prize couples dance 
all night and day and into the next  
until they drop
like a pine split in two.
 
When lightning finds its way
to the steering column of the Cadillac convertible 
first it has to pass through my hands
illuminated like a neon sign
along the boardwalk where I work evenings
 
engraving jewelry in a careful cursive at a stand
lit by floodlights on either side
so I am used to this
as I am used to the curves on the old thoroughfare
that hides a mill that once fulled sheep
 
lightning that finally brings it down
because I search for years 
along the sandy trails for what I focused on 
until I could right myself on the road 
stop seeing nothing but flayed stars through trees. 
​
Kyle Laws
​
Kyle Laws is based out of the Arts Alliance Studios Community in Pueblo, CO where she directs Line/Circle: Women Poets in Performance. Her collections include Ride the Pink Horse (Stubborn Mule Press, 2019), Faces of Fishing Creek (Middle Creek Publishing, 2018), This Town: Poems of Correspondence with Jared Smith (Liquid Light Press, 2017), So Bright to Blind (Five Oaks Press, 2015), and Wildwood (Lummox Press, 2014). With eight nominations for a Pushcart Prize, her poems and essays have appeared in magazines and anthologies in the U.S., U.K., Canada, and Germany. She is the editor and publisher of Casa de Cinco Hermanas Press.