Brenna’s Reviews > Zero at the Bone > Status Update

in the wide open, I walk through
the reedy susurrations
of winter’s meadow that tell me
things change,
get on with your life,
reaved seedpods underfoot
and the tidal sky, the mob
of lost geese.

- Notes from Vermont

Yesterday I threw a snowball and watched a dog chase nothing in particular. Things dissolve like that, in mid-air, even in February when I imagine desire is as endless as wind.

- Housefire

April and ladybugs fill the house… A dear man calling the turkeys in the field. Then the first green… the unrecoverable code of treefrogs in the pond we circled in the old year… Sometimes the little things: trillium in the woods, the red wing of the blackbird, rhubarb and fiddleheads, wild berries, a marsh hawk hunting… I walk knee-deep in the meadow: pink poppies, mint. These are field notes for healing.

Try thinking of yourself as dead.
Wake to porcupine, cardinal, your lover
the queen. Go outside and dig a way out,
first the three wooden steps, the road to the lake
with no name

- January

architecture of a white house,
this draft of rooms, paramour planets,
children with gentle hands, kindling
piled near the moon’s pillar, this draft
of despotic love, then distance, vacancy

- Early Snow

You hold up a mirror for fifteen dollars:
I see cheekbones and clouds.
I see you sad. Then gone.

A father holds his baby like a newspaper.

- Brooklyn Morning