You are only writing words,
he would tell me,
but I no longer ask him,
recalling the dream of hummingbird wings,
passing too fast to see,
yet retained in memory,
focusing just a bit more each year.
That green light
found only in motion,
not much like Whitman’s
tongued grass—
more like the anticipation of coolness
before the sun is shadowed.
Your warm hand asks me no questions yet.
But you won’t take his answers either.
Words can earn greenness too—
the echo of lapsed lands.
Could I answer
those separations?
How people get severed,
robbed of red heart beats,
the joined blood?
I could only remind you of green birds,
the light caught between the wing beats,
moving so fast they stand still.
lives and writes in Toledo, Ohio, where she is an Assistant Professor in the English Department of The University of Toledo. A Pushcart Prize nominee, her poetry has been published in Fourth River, Eclipse, Glass, Baltimore Review, Flock, Storm Cellar, The Cape Rock, and many other literary journals, as well as in a number of anthologies.
