Pinion
I thought bleeding heart
doves feigned injury
to ward off predators
interested only
in the fresh, but boys
puff up their scarlets
to earn their girls.
Imagining my damages
costume and proud.
Imagining our bones
thin like flimsy pens,
leaking navy while
we flutter away.
These days are so
wet and swollen.
You pull me from
my underwater nap
with a song we wrote
the week we met.
Slowly I come back
an animal in queue
awaiting your word.
I’m alive so strangely.
You cry when I say
you might leave me
my ghostly bleeding
heart transparent seep.
I find it difficult
to think about being
inside myself
full of still water.
So much potential for
3 thoughts on "Pinion"
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To respond to your image of water, this poem’s voice is locked in a whirpool. It flicks quickly between the sadness of sinking under the current and loving the gasps of air it keeps swimming toward.
Beautiful work. A great-emotionally-complex narrator
I always feel you know what you’re doing, even if I don’t—a high accomplishment for a poet. You do it here with these short lines, logical line breaks—no enjambment at all, a sign of confidence. And then there are the slightly random interpolations like “These days are so / wet and swollen” and “I’m alive so strangely,” which keep us off balance. You are some kind of savant I think.
Did you mean to trail off at the end, or is there something missing?
Meant to trail off to imply many possible completions. Thank you so much for your very kind words!!