Haruspex
I crouch on grass with wet denim knees,
smoke in my eyes and a cat-scratched throat,
hands cupping the air around a fallen form:
brown and speckled white
girl bird with entrails as tangled as yarn
spilling from her center,
feeding the spent earth beneath
This ancient practice: predicting the future
in another’s prone body is as familiar
as a lover’s sigh or a mother’s crooning song
Inside the house: a dripping faucet, a humming fridge,
the ceaselessly reproducing dishes,
and another day of anxious contemplation
I want to see anything but this inevitable march
to stillness:
the calendar stuck on a single immaterial square
When can we return, if not to our better selves
then to our diverted ones?
I call into the space
where a heart once was
and hear my own lonely voice
Source: Poetry (October 2021)