Poetry

One by one the neighborhood songbirds visited
and stripped us of our brightest threads of pain

carrying them off for purposes that we couldn’t
quite fathom. So we got a dog, felt a little better.

Ixchel, I feel you crossing. Night womb. Tell me where the seeds go.

Alex, do you think God appreciates us
this time of year, going out

in knit maroons, black leather? I’m still no good
at smoking but I liked best the part of your party

Starlings know to veer. Anatomically attuned to each premonition of each starling. Sacred space.

Okay so when we were little playing in the woods
every time we heard a gunshot hollow and clear

my brother would clutch his chest and fall over
every single time and it worked every time

My Latin is limited
My Greek is worse
And the languages
And signs
The drawings
The bones
We find

Dead I would dream the sky and the sky breaking into flakes and falling gathering itself into fat drops plopping into summer dust the acrid smell rising / I would dream the sky shivered the sky repeated as blue eye staring back as mote in...

Squint, reader, through the sudden fog: 
                            the sea’s gnaw and lick-bright:
Eldey, pillar of stone: where two
                            great auks survive, briefly—
before reenacting the end of their story

& my memories of you are thin as cotton worn with age / & soft / & blurred from too much touching too much wear

Pink millions of passenger pigeons slammed the sun shut again and again for fifty thousand years. Above the Ohio River, a solar eclipse for three days straight as one flock passed over.