You are a Burning Planet
BY Sara June Woods
I woke up and looked for you. You weren't there. There was a pile of nickels. Everything was in sepia still. My dear! My destroyer! My cat-face! Even when we are walking on early saturday mornings I can see leaves and feel them each dying. They are not tree-parts! They are thickets in plagueface, drowning like they don't know what words mean. I am in my room and I am a child and I am making a pilot. You in your room and you are a child and you are breaking erasers into piles of broken erasers. There are 10000 hornets inside an abandoned tree and I am hitting it with my tee-ball bat. There are 10000 hornets inside an abandoned tree and you are hitting it with your tee-ball bat. My mother is calling us. My mother is the ocean. She is up to our knees. The salt makes us float. There are birds kniving clouds and clouds falling on their knees! Their knees! All the world is wound in us like clock-springs.
Sara reads "You are a Burning Planet"
Sara June Woods is a poet living in Chicago. She edits Love Symbol Press and Red Lightbulbs. Her first collection, Wolf Doctors, is forthcoming from Artifice Books. Her poetry is published or forthcoming in Barrelhouse, Diagram, NAP, Mudluscious, [PANK], and iO.