Morning Prayer The sun begins its path across the window. I lie heavy and full after sleep, a sack of flour, thanking the lingering cobwebs of dreams for their mysterious metaphor. There was a sadness falling asleep that I cannot remember now; my mind, a machine defaulting to useless, repetitive motion, wakes as a soft, […]
Author: annaspackman17@gmail.com
18/30
Gardener’s Instruction Manual for Self-Change It will not happen all at once. That is simply not the way of things. There are millions of tiny choices collapsed into your new self, seeds scattered by the winds’ hands. First, choose your location. Find places of beauty, the homes to generously growing beings and gentle weather. Start […]
17/30
For My Friend On His Birthday A decade later, I am still making your scrapbook illustrated by high school memories and the stories you tell me. I flip through, watch you turn from a smoking rocket schoolboy to a buzzed head and brittle armor to a corduroy garden feminist to a color-outside-the-lines academic to international […]
16/30
The Phoenix Lab The tried electrodes, but they were incinerated along with the feathers. The MRI and x-ray attempts proved useless as well – if the bird wasn’t moving, it was starting to smoke, and had to be removed. They swabbed and poked in between combustions – a tricky task, since there was no rhythm […]
15/30
The Spiritual Midwife “I am just a baby,” she says to me. “I am crawling. There is so much I know, but I have to learn it again in this life.” Her voice a pure river over me as she sings, shaking a rattle over my belly. “I’m just going to do what feels right. […]
14/30
Gaia The earth feels sad. It has been hard to see her shape-shifting goddesses go, watch the solitary, able-bodied, jealous gods take their place in the hearts of her children. Look at them, so determined to prove themselves independent, unrelated, even, to her. The Greek myths rewritten to describe gods being born out of Zeus’ […]
13/30
The Neanderthal Graves I imagine the ceremony, the reverence of the act. The body, stripped of flesh down to the smooth bones. The living dipping their hands in ochre, staining their palms along with the skeleton. The digging of a bed, the laborious, tender act of tucking a body into the earth. From womb to […]
12/30
New Father The wonder in his face is hard to get used to. He was never an expressive man, his favorite jokes marked only by a curt rush of air through his nostrils, above lips pressed formally together, never loose enough for a grin to escape. Now, the word delight is fully realized in how […]
11/30
“Time for you to go out to the places you will be from” – “Closing Time” by Semisonic (written by Dan Wilson about the birth of his daughter.) The drive home from the hospital is a shared experience of new parents, The abrupt re-entrance into the churning, unpredictable world After days of soft whiteness, scheduled […]
10/30
Birthplaces Shame was at your big sister’s 7th birthday party, When the colors and lights and noise turned you wild, high, And when the giant pink expanse of cake appeared before her, Dotted with the red melting candles, Your breath exploded out of your lips And swept out the flames, Her eyes open before the […]