Handspan
I felt pride at
the doctor’s telling
me I’ve a small
waist and a high pain
tolerance. Pride is
venal. I felt
pain and sought to place
this in the subtext
of the narrative.
Marrowbone’s
nutritious. Marrows aren’t
mallows. Marsh
mallards are edible,
theoretically. We go
to lengths to beautify
our bodies for those who’ll
watch them get gross.
Dress for distress.
I felt pride. I felt
damp. Most of the ways
we talk about these
things felt at
best inappropriate.
The doctor wrote out
names in the illegible
hand of mastery.
I composed
my face.
Who Says Says Who
dog says ah ah eh
kid says hee hee why why
cat says oh
man says how
bird says see see
and the trees won’t tell,
clover eats its teeth and smiles.
the earth goes down against
confession absolution or betrayal
and stars scoot about
their gimballed, noise-damped
spheres.
kid says I.
dog says He.
dark slides over the house without
the slightest skip or bump.
echo is only hope.
(2)
parrot::echo
home::pigeon
A man in a dark hat
taught men to count.
They counted on him, and, to do so,
scattered the gobbets of his flesh
across Sky Table.
A bird is not a pet.
A plume is not a pen.
Man has no home.
The sky was full, would take days
to pass, and the echo of the guns
was continuous.
There was meat in those baskets.
Hunger fell dead those days.
Only children could remember
myths told from bare bellies.
Eenie meenie, they said.
They caught tigers to count
tales. The sky squirmed
beyond enumeration.
You could not say
which way was West.
Dawn Macdonald lives in Canada’s Yukon Territory, where she was raised off the grid. Her poetry appears in places like Grain and Literary Review of Canada, and also in places like Asimov’s Science Fiction and Strange Horizons. Her first book, Northerny, is forthcoming from University of Alberta Press in 2024.