Sunday, January 17, 2021

Last Pieces


To Kim Mosley’s “Last Pieces”

The crow who makes a nest of the world looks for colors from the heart left behind on picnic tables or trailed behind careless pedestrians. He flaps down to the grime of a sidewalk and caws in triumph, Here’s a treasure! Memories of sunsets, a scrap of Jamaica turquoise against white sand, a bonfire of bodies shuddering in bed and the dull of oxblood as habit sets in, pencilled love notes, sweat-stained apologies, burnt bridges, frown lines and quirked-up dimples, twigs that scraped against kitchen windows and bedroom blinds, pleading Let me in, I’ll do anything if you let me stay! It’s a midden of a nest, and it steams with the ache of a thousand families, hums sometimes with Happy Birthday, with tears swallowed at Auld Lang Syne and the That’s Our Song of forty different couples. Reproving sniffs, eye-raised ecstasy, malice like a brown slug. A cattle dog’s bark is caught in the corner by somebody’s sob and a whisper It’ll be all right—hang on till I can get there. Once, There’s nothing you can do that would make me not love you—rarest of all and gleaming. People don’t drop those like a crumb from a sandwich. 

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Who's in the world?

Xiushan said, "What can you do about the world?" Dizang said, "What do you call the world?"