The Wailing Well
by Peg Duthie
Even the water tastes like shreds, like seams ripped open by too much to contain. Every passer-by leaves with cotton-mouth, breath ragged and shallow as the touch of unsure love hovering above a wound where even the lightest salve scrapes the skin like a match.
Peg Duthie's poems have appeared at qarrtsiluni, Strange Horizons, Dead Mule, 7x20, and elsewhere.
When asked to name her favourite fruit, she replied as follows: "I don't have any one favorite fruit, but I get sentimental over lychees: among other things, they remind me of my family's shuttered apothecary in Taiwan, a Chinese lunchstand in Paris, and a gas station south of Jerusalem."
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