Crown Cinquain for a Lost Child, Eight Years Later, and: Week Six of the Fire
- Crown Cinquain for a Lost Child, Eight Years Later, and: Week Six of the Fire
Crown Cinquain for a Lost Child, Eight Years Later
Now Ihardly wincewhen clapping moths. My skin'sgrown used to absorbing its ownhunger.
Crushed hay,iridescentsmear of ground-cherry husk:I knew you once, your wings still gummedwith dew.
A heart-beat's rhythm—hardto unhear. Subway trainsrattle across thick bolts of track.Vacuums
yawn, theirendless dopplerswallowing afternoon.In dreams, ultrasounds fill my room,flood it
with blue,your aliendance a cypher, a plea.
How could such otherworldly gracelive, here? [End Page 142]
Week Six of the Fire
after Aimee Nezhukumatathil
I have faith in the spindle of an aspen.I have faith in its sugar-drenched bark, in the scorched-butterflybruise left by an elk's incisors. I have faith in the tree's skeletonbranch, in the flat stems helping each leaf survive the whiplash of mountain wind, I havefaith in anything with a steady tremble. In light that leaks through.
I, too, once trusted the itch of a velvet antlerto carry my hunger toward a grove. I trustedsomething—instinct, desire, the buck's lung-shaped tracks—to keep me movingthrough the fire, through scarves of molten citrine wafting in a vaulted sky, which is to sayout from under your body, beyond the memory of its long, easy weight,its stack of ashen bones.
The fire blooms into its sixth week.
My faith grows heavy, a cloud baggy with grim rain. [End Page 143]
Allison Adair's recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Best American Poetry (2018), Image, Iron Horse Literary Review, North American Review, and ZYZZYVA; and have received the Pushcart Prize (2019), the Florida Review Editors' Award, the Orlando Prize, and first place in Mid-American Review's Fineline Competition. Originally from central Pennsylvania, Adair now lives in Boston, where she teaches at Boston College and Grub Street.
