If I were to outlive you,
I would feel the poet in me blackening,
nails pulling in like a sea of petals
in the mouth at the end of the world.
I would follow you into the underground,
but I know you’d sweep the past
with such stars there will be no footprints
with which I could reel you home.
It is no surprise that you leave me.
I do not fit with the other sparrows
in your ribcage, do not belong
in your fields when the cornstalks
snap under a broken boot.
Where does the moon go in the daytime?
It buries her heart in a foxhole, leaves it
safe and sweet, and I don’t remember
where it went. I can’t find it because you
gave it to me. At night I feel her scuttling
down my back. I would ask you to catch it
for me, strip hot skin tender, carve a squirrel
from my thigh and mix glitter in the blood.
We would catch her, clawed, gleaming,
lapping up milk with a mirror. But you are so
beautiful. I don’t doubt that she would take you
by the tongue, fly to the heavens, kiss you
senseless and give you my immortal life.
Ellen Webre is a biracial poet from Southern California, who has chosen to live among the extraordinary. She is present in the Orange County and Long Beach poetry scene, and has often been featured. Her present and future publications include Gingerbread House Lit, Black Napkin Press, The New Engagement, Kindofahurricane Press, Plain China Review, and Raundi Moore Kondo’s anthology “Short Poems Got No One to Love.” When not employed at her music school and art studio, she is working on film projects and eating tasty things.
