At seventy miles an hour,
your absence overtakes
the landscape of burnished
silos, townships, and cheap
diesel, the horizon of heat
lightening, dirty Ohio rivers.
You cannot see inside me
to the bird bones that keep
me barely tethered and hollow,
the strings that run inside
are not musical, not clotheslines,
fishing lines, or thread. What I want
you cannot give. Any more than I
can eat my disobedient hands
to keep them from shaking.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 16, Issue 3.
Maggie Blake’s work has appeared in The Southern Poetry Anthology, Tar River, Slipstream, and elsewhere. Her review of Jane Hirshfield’s Come, Thief is available now in Flycatcher.
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