Ronda Piszk Broatch
Sheltering in Place
Morning comes like an alarm, a phone call muffled
under covers, red flash hammering steel fire
pit, metal gutters, wrecked hemlock beyond
our bedroom windows. I admit to drinking
wreckage like desire, the way the moon comes
home like a bitten lover. Flicker signals his mate,
drumming solo, all wild stripe and bright
spot of him, his hyena song breaking sleep.
Today I hold tight to loss, the face in the mirror
only mine when I hold its gaze long
enough to realize I’m not the mother who slips
from my mind now, sometimes for hours at a time.
Somewhere there are boulevards, entire
flight paths abandoned today. Someone calls,
a solitary voice across this knife-edge of survival
to brush the fine bones of our ears with news,
somewhere a virus mutates, and still I protect
melancholia like a swallow in the eaves, each
new day widens into a silence broken into pieces,
each of us a tricked-out bird making music
in hope that someone else will hear.
Ronda Piszk Broatch is the author of Lake of Fallen Constellations, (MoonPath Press, 2015). Her poems have appeared in Blackbird, Prairie Schooner, Sycamore Review, Mid-American Review, Puerto del Sol, and other journals.
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