Remote Control

by Yvette A. Schnoeker-Shorb

The thing was misbehaving;

            it raged with stale, smoky breath.

                        She watched it crawl slowly

                                    over the shadow of a mountain,

not knowing her home was

                                                gone

forever, and she listened

to her mother crying, crying, crying—

wailing broken           only with language

the four-year-old

was told never to use. So she

spoke with the authority

of a child still in her pajamas

at a middle-school-gym shelter.

Confronting it from a distance,

            she tried to control what she saw

                        as her new pet: “Lie down, Fire!”

                                    But the flaming wild beast

was not as frightening

                                    as her mother’s tears.

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Yvette A. Schnoeker-Shorb is the author of the chapbook Shapes That Stay (Kelsay Books, 2021). Her poetry has appeared in the New York Quarterly, The Midwest Quarterly, Camas: The Nature of the West, About Place Journal, AJN: The American Journal of Nursing, Slipstream Magazine, Plainsongs, and elsewhere. She holds an interdisciplinary MA and has served in various capacities as an educator, a researcher, and an editor. She lives with her husband and numerous scrub jays and peccaries in the Central Highlands of Arizona.