bird & hand
listen: you are an eyesore glitzy
as a billboard my bluelight
special baby my-shiny-in-the-rain
but the heart is a homey summer
slippy as a raw egg on my plate
crumped open like a torso my
bloody clementine pitched
on the tarmac under the jizz of stars
and the street’s gone vacant vagrant
the lawn unmown the lawn
a little forest a little savagery
like the one between us darling
a bird trapped in the house
banging and banging and when I
opened my fist to the blueblack
it was already gone
– Anne Shaw, “bird & hand”
via diode: Anne Shaw’s first poetry collection, Undertow, won the Lexi Rudnitsky Poetry Prize and is available from Persea Books; her new collection, Shatter & Thrust, is forthcoming. Her work has also appeared or is slated to appear in Harvard Review, Massachusetts Review, Barrow Street,Hotel Amerika, and Black Warrior Review. Her extended poetry project can be located online at http://www.twitter.com/anneshaw.