Lizzy Burnam 🐞

Pale as a maggot, tabula rasa gaze 
like a glass jar not yet, but soon to be
full of fireflies, their white embers blinking, 
slow as sleep. At dusk, her shadow dissolves 
into ripples, comes back into focus 
as the sun returns. She knows, as any thief
knows, how one can find anything 
by foraging: sweet potatoes, bottle caps, 
a dead dog decomposing next to prickly pear, 
or the rough bark stripped off a log. 
Everything, everything, everything,
says the parrot on her shoulder, 
echoing oh’s and are’s and maybe’s. 
The full Wolf Moon lights the snaking path
up Oros, the mountain, miles 
away from anywhere resembling home. 
The Seventh Bride of Dragonfly 
drinks black ink from the sky and forgets 
what she needs to forget: the sour song
the mockingbirds sang the morning after 
she said yes. She watches him 
move forward and back again, changing 
direction but never changing shape. 
Five hearts, like an earthworm, each beat 
a weaker imitation of the last. 
She’s never mourned a passed moment. 
Time, from di-mon-, suffixed form 
of root da—“to divide." At night, 
she curls into herself like a sick peach leaf
and crawls back into his warm mouth, 
teeth arranged like cathedral seats 
around his tongue. She says, Dragonfly, 
return—come back even as a tiger or a raven. 
She imagines tides of past and future
swelling and crashing inside of her. 
She wonders how this bridge will fall:
with the flash flight of peregrines 
or the wooden grace of a marionette doll.
Only Dragonfly knows. He says, you taste
like everything, everything, everything.