Folie à Deux Days

Everyone is hearing voices from heaven. Their god says this. Their god says that. Someone’s trinity isn’t corroborating their alibi. Mouths are full of an event horizon. Chubby bunny. Two more and this mouth will be nothing but vowels. Adila is weeding the garden, her hands tearing their flesh from the root, and she is crying. Expensive flour. Another fight with her aunt. She makes tea that speaks an odd dialect of bitterness. The first recorded case of collective psychosis involves two sisters with phantom pregnancies. This is called a “break” or “losing contact” with reality. I clumsily grow, knock a fildžan off the coffee table. I called you. By name. Through phone. No pigeon. No flare. My god, my god, why have you forsaken me. Some of us have to come to peace with the fact that an angel, talons spread as wide as a blank page, won’t be at the end of the bed to eat the afterbirth. You with war in your belly. Me with some cosmic and absolute purpose in mine. You with your fatalism. Me with my empire this and that. It seems that no matter what might be lodged inside, we touch one another’s bellies to feel the violence kick one another’s hands and laugh.

WILL SUMMAY

Will Summay (he/him) is a poet and psychotherapist based in Louisville, Kentucky. He is the recipient of the 2025 Page Clayton Prize for Emerging Poets from Michigan Quarterly Review and a co-facilitator of Golden Hours Workshop, a monthly writing group in Louisville. He has been published in Shō Poetry Journal, South Carolina Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Foglifter Press, Palette Poetry, and & Change, among other publications.