Lizzy Burnam 🐞

The dirty work is done; she retreats 
to the peak called Watch Tower, 
cross-legged on the street 
facing the Cathedral. 
She listens for the downhill silence, 
an echo 
of upwind’s childish joy: 
Iodine, sun-daze, tumbleweed. 
She devours heat and sound like a starved animal, 
a flea gnawing on the hides of time. 
Her thumbs ache and she thinks, 
here, at last, 
a pain that belongs. 
A QR code unfurls into a webpage full of lies. 
She remembers how to make a home, 
how to keep a fire burning through the long dark eve. 
Love and fear braided like sage 
and carried beyond the mountain range, 
from this coast to that, 
where the sun sets just a little bit later. 
She watches who’s here and she wonders 
who’s been here, beneath the roses. 
The ghosts of America, the barely not-consumed. 
Three black cats, 
buying suits for a wedding. 
She curls up to protect her face, her stomach. 
An old man nearby says to his companion: 
“Well, now that we’re having lunch, 
what do you think we’ll do for dinner?” 
A prayer for the life she couldn’t afford to spare. 
A prayer for her lover’s wife. 
A prayer for the body under the bridge
with the bullet through its head. 
6-7-7-2. 
She squints. “It’s only this far 
on a map, though—which direction?
Wish I knew.”