Rachel Beachy
This Is Not About Electricity
the Power has gone out. I mean, it’s turned dark.
Everywhere I look: pitch black. What else is there
to do? I keep wandering into rooms and flipping
the light switches even though nothing happens.
I don’t know when it will come back. I don’t know
if I’ll be there to see it. But if you are, if one day
the house is suddenly flooded with light, you will
know someone once believed it could. You will know
we never stopped trying.
Eight Women
There is a woman who walks around the neighborhood
singing aloud to the soundtrack of her own life. Another
who sits silently on the front porch, the echoes of girlhood
at her back. Still another who pulls weeds in the backyard
and rubs dirt on whatever hurts have been planted over the
years. There is a woman in the kitchen who calls her mother
for the family recipe only to find out nobody wrote it down.
The woman who greets him at the door and another who
pretends she didn’t hear him come in. The woman at night,
quiet but for the train of her thoughts, still but for the racing
of her pulse. Who dreams of leaving if only her bones weren’t
so heavy. And the one in the morning, who slips into her
children’s bedroom light as a bird, even though they roll their
eyes at her, even though they used to wake her in the dark
and she did not once turn away.
End of Day
When the children sleep, we sit around talking
about the water bill, the Johnsons, the gap in your teeth
when you were young, which we just were
though we did not consider ourselves young
at the time and you did not have a gap in your teeth
then. Trust me – I stared at your mouth more
than you did the summer before you got braces
which was the same summer I got breasts in another state
but somehow, I can feel even those pieces of ourselves
in conversation, this history we did not share but have
in the years since closed with our little life, little deaths
at our own two hands, which you hold while I tell you
I would have kissed you even then and the faucet
goes on dripping in the next room.
Rachel Beachy is the author of Tiny Universe. Her poetry has also appeared or is forthcoming in HAD, Her View From Home, Does It Have Pockets, Mulberry Literary, ONE ART, Rust & Moth, Sky Island Journal, Thread, and others. She was nominated for the Best of the Net Anthology 2025 and shortlisted for the Central Avenue Poetry Prize 2026. She lives in Kentucky with her husband and children. You can find her on Instagram @rachelbeachywrites.
