Gannets by Dana Miller
Once in a miracle moon,
the dawn will draw a bead on the day
for the white ravens who are punk-rock loitering on your destiny’s flipgrid
--chancy as plutonium,
smelling of quince and calamondin,
looking through lupine freckles,
licking leaf-laden wolf eggs, speckled.
You’ll go out to water your favorite maidenhair fern,
(it’s doing so well on the porch this year)
and you’ll discover in its pot the perfect, newly expired body of a naked hatchling bird,
not a day out of the oology unit and still a mile from weighing an ounce.
A cutting of a different sort.
Because you can’t bring yourself to bury the Thumbelinian thing just yet,
you’ll sit out on the swing next to it, uselessly hoping to see a Lilliputian upheaval in its breast,
writing your next acrylic aegis wearing nothing but your three-days underwear,
in the same flat mask of sunshine that is filled by the Pemberlyn orange of its mother’s distressed calls.
They lay like discarded rinds amidst the Campanula.
Hours later, you’ll catch another glimpse of it as you come in from one of your night runs
down the old dirt road
--the teeniest chase van ever--
its downy would-have-been feathers in a dead heat with the color of the waxing dusk,
to a tone.
You do your post-leg-thrash stretch-out with its closed eye in your peripheral vision
--a bird bismillah.
At last the freshly dug bursary that will play home to your latest Angel Trumpet acquisition
(symbolically bought at the annual plant sale of the city’s oldest cemetery)
will serve as its regenerative under-tomb as well.
That one has been overdue for planting by weeks and is sure to value the company.
Some afternoons curl like fawns in the glen;
others are a dogfight all the way to the wire.
Dana Miller (she/her) is a wicked wordsmith, giggling provocateuse, and mega-melomaniac from Atlanta, Georgia. Her poetic syllables like to trundle in the wilds—usually in search of a smackerel or two. On their way, they have found themselves featured in Postscript Magazine, Better Than Starbucks, Fairy Piece, and Nauseated Drive. When not wielding a lethal pen, Dana adores surf culture, Australian grunge rockers, muscle cars, Epiphone guitars, glitter, Doc Martens, and medieval-looking draft horses with feathered feet. Oxford, England is her spirit-home and Radiohead is holding the last shard of her girlhood heart.