Arsenic Lobster poetry journal |
Issue Thirty-six Winter 2014 |
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The Sparrow and the Snow Annie Virginia For you, I learned to open beer bottles with my bare girl hands and a thick-bladed knife. I didn’t mean to need you to see the danger I can do to metal. But your body is a sparrow battered by snow, and I can boyscout you free from emergency. I know a thing or two about beartrap burials; look at my bedsheets. Don’t believe in the hunters, that they gnawed you open. Look: what shoulders you’ve built pulling closer to core by pieces. So small you’ve slipped through the teeth, pulled your legs into knots, and shaken your wings into pine. More storm. The blizzard tombed you inside itself and trapless, I would do the same. You would still be buried, though I never meant to need you to feed from my hand. It’s the way I want to be gentle but the scalpel becomes a pickaxe.* Here: I’ll show you what’s after the stolen surgery, how I can release violence from my palms, a fledgling I’ve nursed with stitches. You look like its future. I’ve been waiting to become anything that can’t strangle you; I will only ever lure you yes. Tell me the secrets I already have. Far before I knew your name that echoes blood like mine, I observed the way things fall and rise and practiced opening. It did not require a knife; often, we do. *These lines borrowed from Joshua Marie Wilkinson |
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