& in Open, Marvel. Felicia Zamora

The branches salvage. The Vs;

      the Vs greater-than, less-than the sky

      & what is gray heavies

      in the lack of light, in the pupils

      wanting horizon to look back, & long.

      What illuminates just before dark.

      What we call a season, because we must

      call something up the throat, the epiglottis

      vibrates above the slope of the tongue,

      attached. What something

      must we offer back

      to the swirl, the hemispheric homeland—bound

      in pirouette. Our spines knowing we are

      in dance. Our minds chant stability. A feather

      tufted in feathers. Before Vs, there were beaks. A singular beak

      points. An instinct is a direction. You smell the flurry

      before the flake. & barren is intermittent:

      a season is stacked moments

      melting through our mouths caught in capture.

      Always a wait within a gasp. An entrance

      in lips gaped apart. You taste

      dried leaves on your pallet & a promise

      of warmth to tend the frost, to take the low bow

      where sleep peels at the inside of a thing—

      say ‘hibernate’ here. To burrow in something other

      than self. Say ‘what continues to adapt.’ Say ‘inclement.’ Stay

      still in a thought; cloak a word

      over the mouth spool. Understand, you will be let go.

      Alone at the Lake

      How often your mind mirrors the lake,

      surface frozen, mid ripple.

      What was once water

      rips from sand at the seam—

      to be unstitched; bits of you

      scatter & resemble seeds

      dried & un-sowable. Beyond shore

      depths teem. What keeps

      a body held in? Sewn breath

      of January wrinkles thoughts

      here—where buoys strew

      float-less & sad—a crime

      scene in wait of discovery.

      You want to believe

      a shore may stretch forever,

      guarded circumference of self

      looping in & around a body

      immobilized; the amygdala

      disobeys dormancy, streams

      memory without consent.

      & you say “undone” & “regret”

      as part of language the cerebral cortex

      muddled out of nothing

      to understand, and yet—an echo