Just in Time

 

How quickly my eyes
assign meaning
to a tumorous shape
that doesn’t make sense:

it becomes the alchemical
ewer spilling its gold-flecked
liquid in the dark laboratory
of an alien world,

shape-shifting
into the fat hind-quarters
of a brown cat pouncing
on a blue-eyed horse’s head

and then the blue-eyed horse
is galloping toward me,
dragging its chariot of light
through the hills I cannot climb.

 

Lynne Burnett lives in the Pacific Northwest. Recent publications include Blue Heron Review, IthacaLit, New Millennium Writings, Tamsen, Taos Journal of International Poetry and Art, Best of Kindness 2017 Anthology and a Tupelo Press chapbook anthology. She is the 2016 winner of the Lauren K. Alleyne Difficult Fruit Poetry Prize. Her chapbook, Irresistible, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press, spring of 2018.