What Rough Beast | 10 20 20 | Ana Maria Spagna

Ana Maria Spagna
If in What’s Left

if in what's left you should find me in the tangle 		of what's been cut clean     
of what too-long braced the wind	 or too-straight skyward shot    

if in the midday sun	you hear a breathed-beat    that steady as ragged prayers 
sorted and stacked         dangles orange as twine 	  sky-strung to taunt the robins 	

nesting despite		nesting they must

if as you crawl the ditches	of what's left  	you feel what nimble scruff 	
steadies this body	a snow-mashed nest or an apple halved for jays 	

to peck and launch	skyward again	   if in this untangling	
you bleed small   where once you stumbled	where now you straighten 
	
what's been severed	by a kind of nurture

then do we gather	 to bundle tightly 	what's been learned 
so it can be burned again	cold ash burned		

where will you   with what gloved-hands  with what distant 
thunder     where will you meet me 	we who listen 

who clear which way  	 once cleared to go

—Submitted on 10/03/2020

Ana Maria Spagna is the author of the prose works Uplake (University of Washington Press, 2018), Reclaimers (University of Washington Press, 2015), Potluck (Oregon State University Press, 2011), Test Ride on the Sunnyland Bus (Bison Books, 2010), and Now Go Home (Oregon State University Press, 2004). Her poems have appeared in Bellingham Review, Pilgrimage, North Dakota Quarterly, and Spoon River Poetry Review. Spagna lives in a remote town in the North Cascades of Washington State. 

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