After Olivia Gatwood
In this poem, missing girls brush their hair
and hummingbirds fly out from underneath.
I call the hotline for him, before it’s too late. The dead kids
are not dead. Instead, in this poem they strum the cello and fly
through a field of overgrown thistles. Neighbors flicker in apartment windows
and roses bloom from dead poets’ mouths. We have abolished the past
tense. Words are wild wolves, an exodus of yawps. The wax wings work
this time. Children place their hearts in each other’s palms and stand, empty-chested,
in the streets. Children climb out of their vertebrae to see their mothers
who line driveways with quarters for them, who work night shifts and fly red-eyes,
who once cried so fully that their coughs sounded like funeral bells. Children
leap into their shadows to inhabit the night, pressed shirts and skirts wrinkling
in abandoned beds. In this poem, the creak of shutters is really the sound of wings
unfurling. We’ve discarded knives, obituaries. Let this be the fable– not the girls in alleys
and locker rooms, not the boys in rivers and cemeteries, but these children alive,
invisible in open fields, their bodies gorgeous for the futures they seized. These children
who once fastened new wings, who ignored the things that made them unlikely,
younger gods heavy with light. And the ones who never died at all,
the ones who stare at the window or the mirror dreaming imaginary
universes of birds, or children, the ones who know every elegy is a love poem.
Great poem! That last line……powerful! 👏🏻
Love this poem!