It blurts like a parrot in a house fire, this brass so tarnished it might have been struck alive & shaped out of the char of the parrot’s cage. Its shuddering tinnotes fade like a word swallowed, one you thought hidden for good. Now it calls from a window, & unlaces the morning to everything we’ve forgotten, loosens the knots that hold the petals of dahlias & blue phlox into freefall, the gardens fraught with confetti. Where is the wind that vanishes lovers into morning, & reels the notes back? The horn’s valves were lucky coins once, pried from the hands of sailors who will never surface, or plucked from the eyes of the quiet. Cast from hotel keys, how many lost nights glimmer upon its brass? A last place where old letters voice their promises. Listen to the sound of breath pushed through thirteen feet of dark coiled beneath gold ribs. The prints on the brass are left upon us.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 16, Issue 1.
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A little late (but no later than last year), CPR Volume 13 is now on its way to the printer!