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.