WIDOW
Millie Tullis

Mother drove at night without a seatbelt
in case anyone would kindly slam into the back of her corolla
pitch her out with a baseball sound, all clean sailing

In case her body was enough to break through glass
if He would break her neck or spine
please God not just a leg or arm 

Mother had been pregnant for a month
she was too young to rent a car, or get laugh lines
Or have her twenty-two year old high school sweetheart husband 

Die on a weekend trip to the Uintas. Too young to wash his body
with his mother before putting him in a strange oak box.
Sometimes Billy Joel’s “Only the Good Die Young” came on the radio but 

No one ever hit her. 
So she clung to that. 
And Mormon heaven. And the cells
that were blooming into my brother.

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Millie Tullis lives in Logan, Utah with her grey cat, Martin Heidegger. Her nonfiction has been published in The Mud Season Review and The Blackstone Review. In 2016, she won the Elizabeth R. Curry Poetry Prize. Her poetry has been published in Gambling the Aisle, The Sandy River Review, and SLAB.