I Am Trying to Love the Whole World
is such a public display of affection, a flex even,
one the lone magpie staring back from the backside
of a badly shorn sheep finds suspect. I flap my arms
& blink three times. Bad luck to glimpse just one.
Magpie being the only creature rumored to have
refused the ark, preferring to perch high on the mast
& curse the rain. I too keep rewinding this mixtape
of the plague years until I can hear it snap like a tendon
or a tent pole. The world stays busy out there, hammering
itself into softer ground with a flat rock & yet, the sound
of wind softly shaking the stars awake. My world
I have missed your mouth, your morning
breath coming round the wild garlic, your fat
lilacs forgetting to be the flower of death.
– Jenny Brown, I Am Trying to Love the Whole World
Nothing today hasn’t happened before:
I woke alone, bundled the old dog
into his early winter coat, watered him,
fed him, left him to his cage for the day
closing just now. My eye drifts
to the buff belly of a hawk wheeling,
as they do, in a late fall light that melts
against the turning oak and smelts
its leaves bronze.
Before you left,
I bent to my task, fixed in my mind
the slopes and planes of your face;
fitted, in some essential geography,
your belly’s stretch and collapse
against my own, your scent familiar
as a thousand evenings.
Another time,
I might have dismissed as hunger
this cataloguing, this fitting, this fixing,
but today I crest the hill, secure in the company
of my longing. What binds us, stretches:
a tautness I’ve missed as a sapling,
supple, misses the wind.
– Donika Kelly, I love you. I miss you. Please get out of my house.
we are carried.
in bellies. in arms.
in love. in hope.
in caskets. in urns.
in grief. in memories.
our whole lives
and into the next
we are carried
Sara Ria via IG
