Afton Montgomery

Tuesday after the long weekend

I’m baby-fisting an Etch A Sketch at the dentist’s office:
green chiles are roasting, their smell under the curve of pumpkin skins
in the magnetic sand grains dragged to their places by round white dials. 

Almond Joys are still in the bag: worthless to trade but Mom’s
favorite. We’re stripped of puffed parkas and capes, smearing
witch-eyes on the hat strings untied by our mitted pink
thumbs. We construct carpet-side shop windows of cardboard
to trade Smarties, royal Milky Way Midnights, and the single
full-size Butterfinger from the house on Mississippi, plastic cauldron.
The spaniel knocks the silvering 3 Musketeers pyramid
askew with her snout and its stinking coat of eye-ooze. 

Colorado’s record cold will continue through Thursday (from the staticky television box
over the big rump ladies and the files they bend over and over
to find records of my teeth, which “just have to be here somewhere”). 

I shake the image in my lap, hard, wishing to be anywhere
but here, even as the sweating chocolate scent remains—
metallic grains unyielding in the sticky sweet of something old.

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Afton Montgomery is an MFA candidate in nonfiction at the University of Idaho, where she is the managing editor for Fugue. She was selected by Vi Khi Nao as the prose winner of the 2021 Mountain West Writers' Contest at Western Humanities Review and was a finalist for The Pinch Literary Awards in nonfiction in 2018. She also has recent work in New South. Afton was formerly the frontlist buyer at Tattered Cover Book Store in Denver and calls Colorado home.