Poetry

"Lark" featured in Last Leaves Magazine, Issue 2: Raw
edited by Cailey Thiessen, Kiera Baron & Maina Chen.
Last Leaves Magazine, 2021
www.lastleavesmag.com/last-leaves-issues

Available at Barnes & Noble

Purple flowers are growing through my back door
between the cracks of what should close.

I slipped and fell downward on the slope tailbone cracked but continued anyway,
needing to see what was further below.
Stupid of me, I only had that small piece of toast for breakfast
perspiring, fuzzy, continue the descent,
     I thought
Then I landed.
I needed this dark day fog settling, in the
morning
damp, gray the rain misting and then
clumping down fat upon my cheek. I couldn’t breathe
before -
with so much light in the air.

Now I am settled again mossy and grounded
   and free
Encumbered by the surrounding woods, looking up at those leaves dancing
branches in the sky
pitter pats of what is sobbing from otherworlds above.
I hadn’t written poetry for a time
Why was this? Books pages are
consuming.
I killed the battery of my melodies
   of music
Oh well, mud squishing, running between my fingers instead,
And now those dead leaves cling upon the
black knee of my pants.
Snake tails slithering through the grass–
Twins.
I named them once, I think...

I feel safe wandering here, in being, lostness in the
   mystical
What a change that is from hypervigilanced requirements
     demands, fatiguing from before.
A woodpecker nails at that tree from above.

This dark still pond, black beneath hanging branches that
tickle and descend at the waters edge.
Nothing moves.
Down I am immersed into the wet gravity pulling
beneath the unconscious undertows,
taking me nearer to the beginning of what was supposed to be.
Primordial eyes looking back at me–
You are down here, too.
The water osmosing in and out of my open mouth,

And somewhere, a lark sang above.

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poetry 𓇚