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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