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Through my
little window, I
see one day
the entire bird,
the next just
a leeward wing,
the next
only a painful
call, which, without
the body, makes
beautiful attachments
by even
attaching at
all.
Copyright © 2023 by Katie Ford. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on November 1, 2023, by the Academy of American Poets.
for DMK
When a human is asked about a particular fire,
she comes close:
then it is too hot,
so she turns her face—
and that’s when the forest of her bearable life appears,
always on the other side of the fire. The fire
she’s been asked to tell the story of,
she has to turn from it, so the story you hear
is that of pines and twitching leaves
and how her body is like neither—
all the while there is a fire
at her back
which she feels in fine detail,
as if the flame were a dremel
and her back its etching glass.
Morning opens with the comforts of my unbeaten body
a tinkerer’s stack of quiltings and cannings the cloth finch
half-attached to a mobile of warblers and wrens
in the meantime my country sends post to mothers and fathers
back again fly a trinity of boys
with their throats torn out
simultaneity drinks twig tea and stitches
a hidden seam
I take a string to a bittern’s back and tie it
to the looping newborn delight
then read of each strangulation no bone or larynx