bone fragments
embrangled in grass
behind my uvula
floats an old hawk
/
I awake
not in a monastery
on my pillow
a clump of earwax tumbles
/
my thumbnail shovels
against my nose
yellow bodies on the sink
I can’t quite recall a quote
about failure
/
hundreds of printed stories
unread on the shelf
in another’s language
a dark lake
/
a frayed backpack
more browned stems
on the houseplant
/
my muscles ached from worrying
I’d walked for days
and so I had
I’d read most evenings
the same report
separate yourself
the hero said
/
no zeitgeist
without profit
no profit without suffering
a doctor’s chair
always more comfortable
than the patient’s
/
before the world shushed me
blueberries asked me to speak
in late winter
each time someone would ask
how I was
their greed surprised me
/
everyone said
I can talk to them about it
everyone said
everyone says it might help
everyone said
a lightning bolt at midnight
/
the slash of pain
you cannot ignore
you cannot get used to
the sudden plan of punctuation
/
my youth
a badly transcribed yodel
there will be a day
I clear my throat
one last time
/
endless equal signs
marked the highway
the sky roofed with ravens
in a field beside me
a scarecrow with missing eyes
/
jowls of tomorrow
still tear toward my bones
/
in a few thousand months
it will be as if I never wrote
the heart beats in time
to fewer crucial words
fewer rhymes
/
in a sepia diner
in a film
about praying at gravesites
a scholar might say
I have researched peace
but no complete sentence has it
/
all that’s real
all that’s unreal
quake up hills in the mind
if nothing else is nothing else
I’m grateful for the incline
Photo by Bas van der Horst on Unsplash.
Brandon North
Brandon North is a working-class, invisibly disabled, and multi-genre writer from Ohio. He is the author of the chapbook From The Pages of Every Book (Ghost City Press), and his poems and prose appear or are forthcoming in Gordon Square Review, Denver Quarterly, Annulet, The Cleveland Review of Books, Bridge (Chicago), and elsewhere.