PROSE POETRY
SUSAN L. LEARY
SUSAN L. LEARY
KNITTED WINGS
Quiet in its jawing, winter settles upon the earth. The gunshot becomes the brushstroke & the birds, lightly grazed, are broken. Dead leaves peek through snow like cut crusts of bread. Like tiny sutures, like bird beaks. Winter, a violence that softens into its prey as a hand brought tenderly to the forehead by a mother. Winter, the sudden blow. Winter, aspirin on the counter, the birds bandaged & restored to the sky.
Or not.
Everything that happens in winter, happens by candlelight. We see the burgeoning shadows, the inelegant structures, the bones & not the meat. The way we know the sorrow of an animal without any sign of a whimper, limp, or blood. The way even the best mothers can fuck a child up. Prepare for her bird only knitted wings. As in another season when the snow stops & the rain stops & the sky remembers its drought, in an open field, water sometimes helps fire along.
Quiet in its jawing, winter settles upon the earth. The gunshot becomes the brushstroke & the birds, lightly grazed, are broken. Dead leaves peek through snow like cut crusts of bread. Like tiny sutures, like bird beaks. Winter, a violence that softens into its prey as a hand brought tenderly to the forehead by a mother. Winter, the sudden blow. Winter, aspirin on the counter, the birds bandaged & restored to the sky.
Or not.
Everything that happens in winter, happens by candlelight. We see the burgeoning shadows, the inelegant structures, the bones & not the meat. The way we know the sorrow of an animal without any sign of a whimper, limp, or blood. The way even the best mothers can fuck a child up. Prepare for her bird only knitted wings. As in another season when the snow stops & the rain stops & the sky remembers its drought, in an open field, water sometimes helps fire along.
Susan L. Leary’s poetry has been published in such places as Arcturus (Chicago Review of Books), Posit, The Christian Century, and Whale Road Review. She is the author of Contraband Paradise (Main Street Rag, 2021) and the chapbook This Girl, Your Disciple (Finishing Line Press, 2019), which was a finalist for The Heartland Review Press Chapbook Prize and a semi-finalist for the Elyse Wolf Prize. She teaches English Composition at the University of Miami.
