Burnt Rice

It’s a broken leg ⁠—
as in not my fault,
the reason I put food
on the stove and forgot
it (I) existed
which is to say that I
existed once, I think
I was a fish.

When you called me
into the room
to say I burnt the rice,
I faded blue. More blue
living, bluely dreaming
of the days I harvested
oxygen from water,
like God.

Allie Rigby is a Bay Area poet and educator with roots in the chaparral of southern California. Her poems are published in the 2019 anthology The Kerf Seeks, Manzano Mountain Review, Cholla Needles, Adelaide Literary Magazine, and Open Ceilings.

Her poems flicker between encounters with the wild, the tamed, and the awkward. Her big project right now is The Herd, as featured on her website.