Origin Story

Leah Naomi Green

^{“What is dying is the willingness to be in denial.”

—angel Kyodo williams}

The heron flew away

and I wanted to tell someone  

how long it stayed, 

how close I got,

how much I missed it

even as it stood

to watch me,

large-eyed animal

that I am, terrible

at believing what I can’t see.

You see fire in the home

where we live: the world

in cardiac arrest.

A heart attack

is not the onset I want to say

to someone, it’s the flare.

It illuminates what’s already here:

the forests

illuminated, the earth

lit as an origin story.

Here you are,

I say instead,

aloud, surprised

at how close

I’ve been holding you

in the dark.

Flame yields

no new landscape.

It bares the contours

like a map

so we can see

where we’ve been all along,

can see one another

as we walk, and say,

for once, nothing 

at the fire’s steady flight, 

like a heron

lifting in loud beats, 

our silent mouths open  

as if to give it a tunnel.

The deer is still alive in the roadside grass. In an hour, we'll cut her open, her left hip broken, the bone in her dark body; now the white Camaro shocked in the night and the boy wet-faced in the back seat, his parents at a loss by the hood, too young to have meant any of it: the giving or taking. They are glad for our headlights, glad for our rifle. Her head still on, she hangs outside our kitchen window for the blood to drip, skin pulled down like a shirt. I watch my husband undress her with a knife. I wash the blue plates.

the room where I want to rest, I find my hands and am able again to see you— clear eyed where we left one another— last year in the passenger’s seat, having woken after Colorado, which was beautiful and which I did not wake you for, wanting all the aspens, all the golden, quaking aspens, and their silence for myself.

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Origin Story

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Origin Story

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