Angela Corbet
En Masse
It is the eve of the mid-term election.
What to do but write and pick
my cuticles raw, oozing
to the quick. Directives
and misdirection burn,
a searing splatter
over and over
until scorched, then numb.
There is a draining of desire.
I sit on a cold folding
chair in a row of private
spotlighted despair
and listless hours of today,
yesterday. Impotent reason,
pocked and pierced with birdshot,
flutters a moment before it plummets.
Then like a murmuration of starlings
roiling and banking, blackening,
on a twinkle I rise,
divine my neighbor’s temper,
subtle twitch and blink.
Chanting up the lanes,
charging the land, the water,
the air: you and you and you and me.
I resonate like song.
I can call and respond.
Angela Corbet‘s poems have appeared in Sliver of Stone, Wordrunner, and Red River Review. She is a retired English Language Arts middle school teacher, having worked in school districts in eastern Massachusetts.
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