my offer is a crust
we are up to our ankles in confetti. we stage a photograph in which you throw what has already been thrown. i pretend to anticipate the parade that has already passed.
my fortune: learn chinese– wo hen-hao i am fine.
to watch the crowd’s dispersal, you want a bird’s-eye view. a woman will forget when she is with. when she is without, she will remember.
always eat the cookie.
in the morning, the inept handyman installs a window. i’ve gathered the laundry together. when i call you with affection, this is your cue to enter.
our costumes: i am a tree (poet), you are a tree-hugger (poet).
if asked, we have an explanation for waking in the morning: to take out the trash before the company comes. we have an explanation for waking at night: to fill the bags.
when exposed, we sway in a similar manner.
the window had been sealed shut, so if the new one opens, it will be an improvement. first, we must endure the cold months.
the hasty shutter clicks; i am bending to touch the ground.
because here the trees turn one by one, the fall is not magnificent. (the confetti was a coordinated effort, and impressive to everyone except those who would push the brooms.)
elegy
we are born not knowing how to touch things and sometimes it takes a whole lifetime to learn when to lightly press and when to shove. we have to learn which things will crumble under the force of breath and which things will move us before we move them. sometimes, it is best to want to touch something very far away, something like the sun or the edge of the galaxy or even something inside our own bodies like the nucleus of a cell. it is best to yearn for the distant or the impossible because these things can never be harmed by our touch. we are happiest to hold nothing in our hands, and to imagine what we would like to have there, in that empty space. to imagine what it would feel like and how we would hold it.
della watson’s poetry has appeared in Limestone, Make, The Hat, Denver Quarterly, Tarpaulin Sky, Parcel, nanomajority, Free Verse, The New Yinzer, eye-rhyme, alice blue, elimae, Left Facing Bird, Sorry for Snake, Mirage, word for/ word and others. She blogs at Wunderkammer and The Green Life.