What I Kept To Myself

Like in 7th grade when David Myers
held in a sneeze until his left lung collapsed;
the oil slick of his trapped irritation

spilled across his esophagus, and his alveoli,
like fleeing fall geese, pumped clogged feathers,
inky shafts whistling a wheeze-beat, slapping

against greasy black overflow that wrapped
through the estuary of his chest, warped
bull kelp, wound around scales of fish,

gunked fins, finished bodies into unscavengeable rot
not fit for feed. Just like that, what I kept
to myself.

Ellie Rogers recently graduated from the MFA Creative Writing program at Western Washington University in Bellingham, WA. She has served as the assistant managing editor of Bellingham Review, as a board member of the Whatcom Poetry Series, and as chair of the Boynton Poetry Contest Committee. Her poems have appeared in Crab Creek Review, Floating Bridge Review, and Midwestern Gothic. Visit her blog at elliearogers.wordpress.com.