Kate Lebo

I am an animal of the highest order
according to my kind.
My lungs: happy to be paper
bags. My freckles:
exuberant as sugarspill.
They can’t help their volume.

Cotton-warm, shorter
than a fir tree, you predict spring
with your kneeskin.
I refuse the cold
so the wind slippers me with pigeons,
twists my hair into a Victorian handrail.
I’m burnished and blue
for the walk of you.
Only an apricot
is simpler.

We live at the bottom
of an ocean
of air. I am not a sailboat;
you are not a sail.
Yet we know north from south
and divide them
into lesser directions daily,
assuming Seattle is still in Seattle.
Assuming breakfast will argue
with the clock. Assuming eggs.

Every morning a current
pulls you under
and into me.
That you’re late
for work again is as much my fault
as the road’s, and neither of us
is sorry.
Not sorry at all.

Posted 07/21/10

this poem originally appeared in Crab Creek Review