Eros, from the Capitoline Museum; courtesy of wikimedia commons

On Monday, I told my mother about the strange pain between my shoulders; how it’s been growing worse since the night you left.

She said, “Maybe you’re growing wings.”

I think she was onto something.  I think maybe love is like a phantom limb -– the way it aches even after it’s long gone.

By Thursday, the pain had driven right through my scapula. Sometime last night, it penetrated my heart.

Now it sticks like an arrow through my left breast. I keep touching it, and touching it, thinking of you, only half-surprised to find my fingers still come back red.

[Poetry by Shannon Connor Winward can be found in Eternal Haunted Summer, Pedestal Magazine, Strange Horizons, Literary Mama, Star*Line, Enchanted Conversation: A Fairy Tale Magazine, and elsewhere.  Shannon recently earned Honorable Mention in the L. Ron Hubbard’s Writers of the Future Contest for short fiction, and as an emerging artist in literature by the Delaware Division of the Arts. Her debut chapbook of literary and speculative poetry, UNDOING WINTER (Finishing Line Press), was released in 2014.  In between writing, parenthood, and other madness, Shannon works to support local artists, and here and there has been familiar with a microphone.  Visit her on the web at www.shannonconnorwinward.com]