Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons
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Exploded nightjar, wings blasted like a broken plastic folding fan,
there’s nothing more worthy of worship than you, dead so you don’t
ask for respect, dead but it is why I respect you even more, having lived
a life and having failed it with such bombast, flying just low enough to get smacked
by a bread truck, never not dodging predatory birds in the night, a life if it counts
as a life forced into the crepuscular since it wasn’t your choice to have to wait until
dark to do your business and I hope it doesn’t seem like I pity you and I hope it
doesn’t seem like I pity the Alabama girls and the Georgia girls, the confused
fifteen-year-olds who just got cell phones, the ones who could play instruments if they tried,
the ones who are like mothers already who, like you, must drag their secrets
into the shadows by their beaks, statues of St. Sex Ed and St. Abortion knocked down
and busted inside their fucked-with China cabinets, the girls who can officially never
own that quote that affluent art boys tattoo on their biceps: “I am my own god.”
My neighbor once told me that when you put a dog down you will want to walk
into the nearest intersection and of course that is true. Not many know the sound
of a skull being crushed but there are some people who know. My skull
isn’t broken but my arms might as well be, so pointless it is to try to put you
back together. If you were an outdoor kitty I would offer my crawlspaces to give birth in and
when it was time, I’d offer my bushes for you to crawl into and die.
That is the only lullaby I know anymore.
Sarah Morrison is a musician and poet from Tallahassee, FL. Her 2017 collection Unmentionables won the Mart P. Hill award for Outstanding Honors Thesis in English. She has been published in Queen Mob’s Teahouse, Apalachee Review, and elsewhere. After the completion of an upcoming musical project, she intends on returning to school for her MFA.