She listens to the corpse of a wingbeat.
The stories of faraway people
etched on sea glass and flower petals,
like legends told for lullabies
printed with rose thorns
in the absence of paper.
Do the fingers of clock hands
hold the questions of children,
the way wine kisses guilt
and disposable wedding rings?
Handmade letters and gift-wrapped packages
resemble the music of a laughter
that isn't really there.
How many faces
are the reflections of a moment
dying in the second of a memory-
or the dances in the i love you's
that you never told me.
She walks this underpass
embalmed with the graffiti
of the broken, the glass
bottles blue and broke
on cigarette dirt -
where she disinters
glints of rusting rails,
steel line parallels
of a western yesterday
and gold melded dust.
Nonplussed by
this tunnel's twilight eye,
this lying catacomb echo
of a locomotive ghost,
she must get out, escape,
breathe Georgia magnolias,
and leave her solastalgia ache
to a zephyr wind,
to elysian fields.
But it's all she feels,
this millstone of loneliness
chained to the selfsame shame
that came with breaking
her mother's sidewalk spine,
the crab leg line of bone
beneath her very own skin.
So she ta