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.
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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Ooof. That last line! So good.