Brandon Lewis
Jackdaw
The question lingers: will you strike
A match? It chirrs all day, and this cold summer
Night I shuffle kindling in its chimney home.
It lines its nest with hair, as drawer by drawer
You empty the family estate. You alone can spot
Any patina of illness in my face, my gait.
Turning sharp
On the foxglove path you say you cannot hear
The illness-talk a day longer, you must
Tell yourself I will heal or you will
Find a way to die. Everything is a clock—
I am a clock. But I want to say love we are
Changelings who find ways. The whole earth is
medicine. Low clouds
And kestrels sweep continent-ward over fields
Once fencing horses and the gorse and bracken
Heath where the gardener is buried.
Build me a seamless tomb.
The last time we got high was in a garden humbler
Than this, the kids asleep, and I bent on all fours to
graze mint leaves—
Remember you laughed but followed, the whole earth
Medicine. Also buried in the field:
The gardener’s savings that he hid from his wife.
Both plots are lost. I want to not be useless
But want to not need an exact use. Should we
Scream up the chimney, warn the jackdaw
it comes?
Fourteen deer graze the field, longing for
Our roses, flourishing dangerously
Without a predator. They can munch it all:
The garden, my socks, England. Just devour the pain
Or build me a seamless ex-pat tomb. If we stay,
If the whole earth is medicine, how could we be
running away?
The fear is not the bird dead, but the nest when it ignites
A fireball. Rises into the night a terrible
Wonder of twig and hair, feather and belonging. Lands
who-knows-where.
Brandon Lewis lives and teaches in NYC. His poems can be found in journals such as The Massachusetts Review, Barrow Street, Anomaly, The Missouri Review, The Atlas Review, The Café Review, Sixth Finch, and Salamander. His poetry has been semi-finalist for several contests, including the Brittingham/Pollack Award the Elixir Anti-venom Prize, and he has published interviews in American Poetry Review and book reviews in publications such as HTMLgiant.
Return to November 2021 Edition
The question lingers: will you strike
A match? It chirrs all day, and this cold summer
Night I shuffle kindling in its chimney home.
It lines its nest with hair, as drawer by drawer
You empty the family estate. You alone can spot
Any patina of illness in my face, my gait.
Turning sharp
On the foxglove path you say you cannot hear
The illness-talk a day longer, you must
Tell yourself I will heal or you will
Find a way to die. Everything is a clock—
I am a clock. But I want to say love we are
Changelings who find ways. The whole earth is
medicine. Low clouds
And kestrels sweep continent-ward over fields
Once fencing horses and the gorse and bracken
Heath where the gardener is buried.
Build me a seamless tomb.
The last time we got high was in a garden humbler
Than this, the kids asleep, and I bent on all fours to
graze mint leaves—
Remember you laughed but followed, the whole earth
Medicine. Also buried in the field:
The gardener’s savings that he hid from his wife.
Both plots are lost. I want to not be useless
But want to not need an exact use. Should we
Scream up the chimney, warn the jackdaw
it comes?
Fourteen deer graze the field, longing for
Our roses, flourishing dangerously
Without a predator. They can munch it all:
The garden, my socks, England. Just devour the pain
Or build me a seamless ex-pat tomb. If we stay,
If the whole earth is medicine, how could we be
running away?
The fear is not the bird dead, but the nest when it ignites
A fireball. Rises into the night a terrible
Wonder of twig and hair, feather and belonging. Lands
who-knows-where.
Brandon Lewis lives and teaches in NYC. His poems can be found in journals such as The Massachusetts Review, Barrow Street, Anomaly, The Missouri Review, The Atlas Review, The Café Review, Sixth Finch, and Salamander. His poetry has been semi-finalist for several contests, including the Brittingham/Pollack Award the Elixir Anti-venom Prize, and he has published interviews in American Poetry Review and book reviews in publications such as HTMLgiant.
Return to November 2021 Edition