Dead Bird’s Skull

By Marie Kressin

By the river, I pass a pearl-white spider sack of eggs
that could not be a spider sack of eggs—
and I don’t stop
to look until I remembered her saying: Noticing shit
is how we save the world. I turned and knelt.

Two bulbing lobes, two black holes dusted
in feathers, a too-big beak, poor crushed
decapitated
body and open-ended questions
for wings. Sometimes, I feel the world turning,

and it’s okay that I can’t start my life over. Right now,
I’d like to prick my finger on this needle
mouth, allow
my left ventricle to balloon
blood through a puncture wound. That’s how

I want to say: I’m sorry and thank you and sweet
angel, we don’t know how to stop failing you and
failing you
and failing you and there is a future where
you and I become the same water.

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Marie Kressin is currently an MFA candidate at the University of the South. She has been published in Arkansas's Best Emerging Poets, Timber, and elsewhere. She supports her habit of paying rent by writing full-time for a local education magazine.

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