Find and share the perfect poems.
First of all, I was born dead, a crown of snakes sleeping
in my fever. Dreams threatened terrible resurrections
like a seaside cemetery. Some days I’m glad
my diagnosis means seven fewer years. Other days,
I bury all the shovels. Miracles bloom out of my mistakes.
Always, always, the urgent indigo bruising the morning.
Copyright © 2025 by Traci Brimhall. Published with permission of the author.
What else can I say? The book opened
like a future or a grave. I chose a wilder way
through the woods, stalked by a mosquito
whining for my heat. I chose a stranger’s mouth
because it rhymed with love, because it
finished me off like a sentence. My throat
like a hummingbird’s, mistaken for a jewel.
I like being a mammal, the only animal who
weeps, sadness a foreplay between sodium
and water. I admire my drooping belly for
waxing and waning like a moon, stretching
over my growing son and then gathering
back together like theater curtains. My ring
finger is happy to wear a different weight
We prefer to do it with the lights on,
the Victrola scratching How long can it last?
against the tremble of curtains. Patient,
we learn the walls, their glossary of knocks,
translating harlequin and dust. What we
know lives here—lonely bone star blossom
of the spider plant, lost bee on the sill,