Dry

 

The tropics pantomime a season, line a
nest with things fallen, found, and pinneate.
Epochs of salt excise this brittleness. How
were fronds prepared for Calusa thatch if
not through successions of distress? A downy
pelican sister trundles out its egg twin for
all the regurgitant ministrations it can get.

Someone bequeathed to us spindles of
palms, an ill-considered bauble for the
foreclosed grid of an unseen 50 years.
They shake out girded feathers that float
to easy rest in the fractured street.

Do these balanced wisps detect the burning
of their kind just inland, and panic ever up?
Smoke knits a sun dog. Such tallness is
sapsucker-pocked, and we wish to maintain
our necks so we only see their striving,

fine tinder when it falls.

 

 

Bury me in the sky

Hold tight to the dream
with the balled fists
of an infant. Prayer flags tatter
as bald griffons in search
of those things earth
loves to offer sky – life
that fed now feeds
and is carried as mudra.

Bring me those bones.
May you stoop to enter
a hundred mud-framed
doors greeted by the deep
wrinkles of a smiling Tibet,
the generous fat of a mother
yak melting into ever more
generous tea. If a lama is

laughing, it is in a far place
and China is just a tag
inside your dress and no one’s
yet said “Namaste.”
These peaks are mudra, earth,
all fault, sutures and boundary
thrust, growing bones
from the feet on up forever
giving birth to itself
on the roof of the world.
I was born a new infant
on the roof of your Empire
State, wine glass a disabused
vessel, spirt transmigrated,
your fists balled up, wrinkles
deepening, coloring like mud.
There’s no disinterring what
can never be buried. No soil.
Exposure the only work of time.
The dream does not climb,
can only be scuttled. If
this ship lands on any rocks,
it will be at 12,000 feet
where no water bubbles up.

 

 

 

 

Poetry by Sara Comito has been published in journals such as Thrush Poetry Journal, A-Minor Magazine, Blue Fifth Review, and Mojave River Review. Her first fiction piece is due to be published in Defenestration Magazine this October. She currently works in the social services field engaging Hurricane Irma survivors in Fort Myers, Florida, where she has lived for 17 years. That’s also how old her son is.