- Because there is no word for you
or the almost we had, I name you
finch, flirting with the edge of my vision.
Not a gift or prize. Not in a cage or room.
A force of volition, beating against mine.
- Purple, zebra, euphonia, house,
red-headed bullfinch, black rosy-finch,
chaffinch, Cassin’s, goldfinch.
Briefly visible on a branch
before I turn. Gap that held your song.
Song heard at the border of sleep.
Bird barely here, do not leave.
- I am all yours, you wrote.
I am all yours, you said.
How will we spend our days?
- I delighted in you delighting in me
delighting in you, and so on.
Each talk like spinning yarn from wool.
Every kiss a feather in our wings.
All the time to come held like a breath,
like a bird in the hand.
- Even though we disagree
as the world does: in panic
and without hope. In sudden rupture
and jagged recovery. Avoiding harsh words
with no words. Even so, I know
the hours you keep and feel
your voice through your chest
pressed against my ear and this
cannot count as nothing,
though, like the world’s sorrow, it does.
- The thrill of a bird is in the folded wing,
in what it could do but does not,
like a hand on my hair or teeth
at my palm. Or the thrill
is in a flight so quick you’d question
your own senses, whether
anything was ever there
on that unmoving branch.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 25, Issue 3.
Laura Cherry is the author of the collection Haunts (Cooper Dillon Books) and the chapbooks Two White Beds (Minerva Rising) and What We Planted (Providence Athenaeum). She co-edited the anthology Poem, Revised (Marion Street Press) with Robert Hartwell Fiske, and her work has been published in journals including The Glacier, Ekphrastic Review, Los Angeles Review, and DMQ Review. She earned an MFA from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers. She works as a technical writer and lives near Boston.
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