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.