Emptying Town (audio only)
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God’s Will
Isn’t there a bird (what’s its name?)
that collects blue
things—bottle cap, rubber band,
bits of broken
cups—to make an elaborate, sparkling
blue nest on the ground. At
a meeting, a woman spoke of
her brother, who’d just
OD’d—teary,
she said she knew it was God’s
will. We all want to be held
a little higher. Bower
bird, that’s the name, it gathers
all that blue
& arranges it into a nest
to make the beloved, of course,
2019
Sleeping Beauty
When Sleeping Beauty finds the spindle
& pricks her finger & falls into her hundred-
year sleep, everyone around her falls as
well—her handmaids, her grooms, the cooks.
Dogs collapse in the courtyard, horses fold
in on themselves in the hay . . . . I’d forgotten
all that. Even the fire returns to embers,
fire’s version of sleep. In some tellings all
this sleep is a blessing, a solution to grief—
no one will miss her because they will sleep
as long as she sleeps & they will wake
when she wakes, no one having felt
2019
Killdeer
You know how it pretends to have a broken wing to lure predators away from its nest, how it staggers just out of reach . . . if, at this moment, you’re feeling metaphorical, nest can be the whatever inside us that we think needs protection, the whatever that is small & hasn’t yet found its way.
2018