Christine Cock
My Dear Cousin,
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It's all about the Dewars' second sight. What courses through our blood, yours and mine. About our ancestors casting spells. Seers dreaming the results of battle or matrimony. Stomping the split wooden tip of the shillelagh into ground with a certainty born in heather and gorse. Of how dreaming about you means we have flown across cold, deathly waters to swirl in a connection of highland dust. It's about how the ache woke me again, wondering if Aberfeldy is hospitable in the damp fall. Unlike what a local weathercaster coined our humiture––a constant peninsular 80's. Reminds me of visiting you in St Louis in the summers. We'd sleep in a bed together, naked without covers, allowing the fan's slow turning blades to cool us. In fifth grade you and I looked nothing alike for having fathers so similar. Dark Scots, yes, but beyond that, I was a stick, you had already bloomed with breasts the size of melons in the fields beyond the window. You asked me if I wanted to touch them. Of course I did, but was too shy, knowing my body couldn't reciprocate–– flat, with ribs like corrugated tin.
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Biography
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Christine Cock (she/her) is a poet and naturalist living in the woods of Florida. She received her BA in Creative Writing at Eckerd College while working in zoological conservation. She has been published in numerous journals and online journals and has been included in anthologies such as Screams in the Silence, benefitting victims of abuse. Her poetry was also included in an exhibit at the Florida Museum of Natural Sciences benefitting avian conservation.
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