Best Poets of Members

I was leaving a country of rain for a country of apples. I hadn't much time. I told my beloved to wear his bathrobe, his cowboy boots, a black patch like a pirate might wear over his sharpest eye. My own bags were full of salt, which made them shifty, hard to lift. Houses had fallen, face first, into the mud at the edge of the sea. Hurry, I thought, and my hands were like birds. They could hold nothing. A feathery breeze. Then a white tree blossomed over the bed, all white blossoms, a painted tree. 'Oh,' I said, or my love said to me. We want to be human, always, again, so we knelt like children at prayer while our lost mothers hushed us. A halo of bees. I was dreaming as hard as I could dream. It was fast—how the apples fattened and fell. The country that rose up to meet me was steep as a mirror; the gold hook gleamed.

Crow, I cried, I need to talk to you. The whole sky lurched. Black wings. Most bitter trees I've ever seen. Wild daffodils. Here is a world that is just as the world was world before we named it world. Here is a sky that screams back at me as I rush toward it, darkening.

I shut that black wing from my heart. That bad bad bird. I slam the light. Wrong love, it flaps, wrong love. I slit the curtains of my eyes. If one more death makes room for one more death, I've died enough. I've died in rooms that bird screeched through, the blood-tipped feathers in my hands. The years of longing in its craw. The little claws like dangling hooks that ruined my nakedness for good. Wrong love, it flaps, wrong love. I wave my arms to make it go. As if the sky could take it back. As if my heart, that box of shadows, could be locked against itself.