Lizzy Burnam 🐞

What else is there?
All the perfect curios of living, loving
are preserved in poems like bugs in amber: 
the orchestra of birds in April, 
cheery flight of dandelion seeds, 
lemon stripe of mourning cloak butterflies, 
sticky-chinned bite of caramel apple,
jaundice eye, 
and mourning dove's coo to soothe the hurting heart. 

The hurting heart, afternoonified 
by metaphor, etched in clay and lead and ink
with hands as real as mine. 

With hands as real as mine, 
a touch in fog and shadow. 

All's left are weasel words, an embolism, 
letters slow like trickling water.  
Pigeon hearts. Chicken shit. 
It's no use, isn't it? 

Any portrait of the future would always look like this:
coffee on the sun porch, 
a war too far to hear the windows break,
questions crackling like static in a sigh,
and all the what's-left country things, 
building nests and scavenging
while salmon swim the wrong direction, 
chasing cooler rivers for their fry. 

Newborn babies’ birthmarks were once known as LONGING-MARKS, because they were said to take on the shape of something desired by the mother.

@HaggardHawks