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Snowbirds
By Trina Burke
Do you realize
how far apart my eyes
and how proximal?
I am no fan of your
grammar, your syntax.
No more than picnic tables
or hammock posts,
dry nostrils and sea breezes.
I’m looking for a different way
to say vacation. The globe
spun on brass and stuck
with pins at this very point
where I am and that very
point where you are.
My humidity and your
humidity is as hot is to
cold, still wet with ideas
about growth in winter.
What is corolla?
As round as the winged
predator’s displaced trajectory
plucking small companion
animals out of suburban
backyards. This week
I have seen a pair
of Sandhill cranes—
tall, slow, epic.
Shad silver spoons
tossed in/out of the lake.
Everything wet with a hint of fish.
This not being home,
I am no longer acquainted with climate.
Island in the highway, rustle of sabal.
Beach, unfathomably expansive.
Here I can’t see beyond that stand
of cypress across the lake.
The water is sweet
maple, cannonberry. When you arrive
you won’t believe me.
Trina Burke's writing has been featured or is forthcoming in Drunken Boat, Fawlt, Double Room, Quarterly West, Word for / Word, and the Iron Horse Review. She received her MFA in poetry from the University of Montana, and currently lives and works in Seattle.
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