Still
It was April and it was always about to be something else.
It was the way the belly of birds flashed and flickered against the sunset at seven in the afternoon in April. Like stop motion right before your eyes as they faded high up there until the flat planes of their bodies shifted and you lost them against the outlines of the bubbling blue clouds in the distance that always threatened to break, but rarely did.
How a body can become surface, how fast something alive turns into shape, into outline, into something registered and lost, a kind of flattening. The sky does this. So does the act of looking too long.
She hoisted a bleached skull to the desert sky and the bones went bright against it, brighter than the animal had been and not despite the dying, but because of it. The stripped thing as the most present thing. A flower into a civilization. A pelvis, the architecture of an opening. What the eye wants to slide past, made to stay.
She drove out alone into it for hours. The high desert in the particular light of early morning, the bones and stones gathered already abandoned by their first purpose. She stood still long enough that things came forward. The flicker before recognition, right before something collapses into category and you lose it the way you lose the birds.
It was April and it was always about to be something else. The light fell long across everything still soft enough to receive it and you felt the grief of it already, the loss arriving with the thing itself, the way you loved it most in the moment you understood it was going. Heat steaming, the sky about to change its mind.
Some news. My chapbook, Voices Carry, was a semifinalist for the Deborah Tall Lyric Essay Prize. I’m still sending it out on query, but proud of the little engine it is, searching for a home.
And finally, thank you for being here with me during this first year. Your support has meant so much and is a much-needed light in unexpected shadows. While my cadence slowed on publishing due to large and incredibly good life occurrences, I’m back with a new schedule announcement: All future issues will publish on Sundays.