Читать книгу & in Open, Marvel - Felicia Zamora - Страница 14

Before Winter

What barren waits for. Flesh

culls a layer, a layer more. Wind becomes

estranged. The branches salvage. The Vs;

the Vs greater-than, less-than the sky

& what is gray heavies

in the lack of light, in the pupils

wanting horizon to look back, & long.

What illuminates just before dark.

What we call a season, because we must

call something up the throat, the epiglottis

vibrates above the slope of the tongue,

attached. What something

must we offer back

to the swirl, the hemispheric homeland—bound

in pirouette. Our spines knowing we are

in dance. Our minds chant stability. A feather

tufted in feathers. Before Vs, there were beaks. A singular beak

points. An instinct is a direction. You smell the flurry

before the flake. & barren is intermittent:

a season is stacked moments

melting through our mouths caught in capture.

Always a wait within a gasp. An entrance

in lips gaped apart. You taste

dried leaves on your pallet & a promise

of warmth to tend the frost, to take the low bow

where sleep peels at the inside of a thing—

say ‘hibernate’ here. To burrow in something other

than self. Say ‘what continues to adapt.’ Say ‘inclement.’ Stay

still in a thought; cloak a word

over the mouth spool. Understand, you will be let go.