M.K.BRAKE

 

 

 

 

 

Little Harbor

 

Found:
cave of bullet holes
                                ghosts with winter birds

Feeling much less me,

                                more the abandoned cabin
                                shot-through with empty word forests
                                searching and hollowed out

                                                        sexless rock

Now..………………………………………………………………………………..………………
………………………………………………………………………………………………………
……………………………………………………………………………………...…I am of
crevice and dip, purposeless pine, evergreen for nothing, body shaking

Breathing the twig interlude—

*
                        *
                                                *

                                                —inverted shimmer desolation,

the black spindles that grow up from this place
remind me of your crows’ legs,
crooked convex snow

                                row upon row
                                                upon row
                                                                row
                                                                        row

Horizon upon horizon upon
splash of scarlet where you
brushed against my

only color for miles

Five-toed prints
left here when you rejected
where until now I’d kept the black water

Close my eyes see only snow close my
lips see only bracken
my legs
only mulch
close           breath
brackish slush, edge of an almost-frozen pond

The broken wing of a broken bird

is all

cowering from cold that
           strips
         through
layers of my fracture
                                                        my encasement that could’ve been a home for us
                                                                               a perfect moisture
                                                                                          inside

The frost crystallized there in mucus
sparkled with sun
{rainbow color, unborn wing}

You and I, black crow
                   black blood that drips feathers on the green
we imbrue the Evergreen

Weakly shedding structure
I sputter into frost
                                                        head hit on a rock-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------find me leak into the cold comfort

Timber into sparse graveyard withal
                                                        —atrophied cells in my tongue start to tremble

My wish a fog exhalation
My wish young pools you find

eulogized and frostbitten                           burgundy and ash

                                                   Run
before and after
of this splinter                              run
Valley bellow
like you’d dull mountain peaks
with my skin

                                Breathe me out
                                into an unknown holler

 

 

 

M.K. Brake is the author of The Taxidermist's Girl, forthcoming from Dancing Girl Press. Her work can be found in or is forthcoming from Fruita Pulp, TAGVVERK, Best American Experimental Writing, and others. She holds an MFA in Poetry from Louisiana State University. Currently, she's spending a nomadic summer wandering through the southeastern states before her great trek to Iowa this fall to begin her MFA in Nonfiction.