From the Sky and from the Birds
Not all the knives are in the museum.
-Mark Haddon, “A Rough Guide”
Dead birds lie next to polished agates,
their beaks needle-dropping onto planetary rings
singing omens good and bad, sought and unsought.
Sometimes the moon switches place with the Dog Star
at the witching hour. Sometimes you forget her name
but it comes back when you and your hips
and hands are singing Joey like it’s 1997.
When is a ghost just a ghost?
Not all knives are in the museum.
Not all wounds need their own drawer.
Some knives at the airport are just for slicing bananas.
Sometimes your heart hurts because old
banana peels look just like giraffes
and you can’t help but think of all the water
stuck in all the wrong places. Sometimes a dream
is just a dream but when you turn the corner
before the storm and an accidental meteor
aligns with the first spring screech owl
in the apricot tree trilling like a foal
you cannot help but wonder.
Born and raised in the woods of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, Chloé Leisure now lives in Colorado, where she is a poet and educator of all ages. Her poetry has appeared in the Blue Mountain Review, the Colorado Review, PANK, Permafrost, and The Tenderness Project and elsewhere. She was the 2014 Fort Collins Poet Laureate and is the author of the chapbook, The End of the World Again (Finishing Line Press).
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Spring 2021