Red Hot Chili Sun
by Kathrine Bancroft
Sun as hot as a red-hot chili. Cicadas singing their age-old songs. Dirt, dry, crusty, under my knees. Mama hollers my name – over and over and over again til it don’t feel like mine anymore, til the wind picks it up, and moves it on. Her voice is like daddy’s chisel – hollowing out the bits of myself that weren’t ever just mine. The bits that were shared. Curl right here, a dormouse, an ammonite wound tight. Close my eyes, count to sixty, twice. Real slow. Say Mississippi in-between to make it slower, to make it like a real clock. Sixty twice is two minutes. That’s the exact amount of time he had on this earth ahead of me, arriving on a surge, bawling and blue, leaving me in his wake. And now only god knows how many minutes longer than he I will have before I get called home. Corn high above me. Clouds streaking across the sky. Mama’s voice has faded. But I’m not going back in. Not quite yet.
Kathrine Bancroft is a writer, poet and communications consultant from London. An alumnus of City University’s Novel Studio and a 2019 City Writes competition winner, Kathrine also holds an MA in Modern and Contemporary Literature from the University of London. She is a LISP 2024 Poetry Competition finalist and a contributor to their 2023 Rising Stars & Promising Pens anthology. Her work has also recently been longlisted for the 2024 Aurora Poetry Prize and published in the Lost at 27 anthology from the Cicada Song Press.
‘Red Hot Chili Sun’ won third place in The Prose Poem’s 2024 Prose Poetry Competition.