Headline Poetry & Press

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.

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