Thrush Poetry Journal
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Barbara Westwood Diehl

Breach

Broken and upended oak 
branches axed by hurricane 
slash of rain, slash of rain

nest breached, cracked 
a scatter of blue eggs
yolk slopped from a shell

their blue, yellow, all white
in the inside out of lightning

Embryo of bird in grass
feathers pressed in leaves
snapped spine, broken quill

one eye that looks at the sky
looks at the sky
a book of what the body was 

Dust to oak and back to dust
sawdust, paper leaves

crosshatched as a map 
so often creased 
across a lap 

that streets tear 
mountains flatten into fields
bridges collapse into the paper sea

North torn from south, east from west
a compass of rain, needle of rain

Here is the rain breaching your church
Here is the steeple, all the people

they are no more than fingers steepling 
knuckles, frangible skin, 
thin nails holding the blood back

the white-blue of them when the blood 
leaves
the blood leaves
cardinals flown from your fence

the pickets a hatch of bones




Barbara Westwood Diehl is founding editor of the Baltimore Review. Her fiction and poems have been published in journals including MacGuffin, Confrontation, Potomac Review (Best of the 50), American Poetry Journal, Measure, Little Patuxent Review, SmokeLong Quarterly, Gargoyle, Superstition Review, Word Riot, Bartleby Snopes, Penduline Press, Northwind, NANO Fiction, and Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine.




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