We Have Become Death
Mary Ann Honaker
A patch of forest remains between this house
and the next, where a doe often hides with her fawn.
Crows circumscribe it all day, screeching out
to hallow the shadows of hewed trees.
I knew a clergyman whose life tasted so bitter
he hung a birdfeeder in a pruned maple,
sat with a sour sting in his throat
until the crows came; then he shot them.
But I don't mind their cawing, a raw sound
that matches my heart, which I scraped out
as one would a pumpkin, carved it a snarl,
set the inside on fire. At night the black birds
recede into their black nests to rest in the black trees
against the black sky and are silent. Somewhere the man
coughs up his cud of hate and masticates it, savoring.
I can't know what a crow knows: if a wind is weak
and will drop me, spiraling; or if it has lift
lively enough to sky all the heaviness of me.
My candle burns lower, weeping wax, and finally
the wick gives up its stench of endings. Maybe crows
do long for the once-forest that is my house, midnight lit,
as I long for my heart before I cored and monstered it,
even for the glow that blackened its walls. I am charred.
An owl I cannot see croons her three funerary notes.
Mary Ann Honaker is the author of It Will Happen Like This (YesNo Press, 2015) and Becoming Persephone (Third Lung Press, 2019). Her poems have appeared in 2 Bridges, Drunk Monkeys, Euphony, Juked, Little Patuxent Review, Off the Coast, Rattle.com, Van Gogh’s Ear, and elsewhere. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart prize. Mary Ann holds an MFA in creative writing from Lesley University. She currently lives in Beaver, West Virginia.