HOMEMADE

You grow myopic,
Watching the blur of days
Crawl like creatures past your windows.
Ground their rhythm to glass.
View yourself in this bed of reeds
That each morning blooms new cicadas,
Clipped voices threading you through.
Emerge as some sentient being,
Scrambled code and sewn-on wings.
Sun yourself here in this shadow
Drawn in charcoal on a wall.
You who feel mountains
Expand in your throat,
A memory someone else has lived.
You resplendent, who nevertheless
Erases self in the cup of days,
In spoons spread like palms
And in whispers of egg yolks
Awaiting your breath
To hush them alive.

AFTERMATH

When we’re gone
The sky will exhale like a candle
And slip itself into the beating chests
Of tree frogs and door mites
And a million migrations.
The cats will tunnel
The shadows of their bodies so deep
Into this quaint sleeping earth
It will never recover,
And fruit bats pulsing electric
In the sockets will insert their apostrophes
Into closets and cloaks,
Into chimneys and caves
And all the gray places
We never before breathed into being.
And everywhere forests
Will spring violet wings, heading off
Somewhere far more opaque and surreal.

Shannon Cuthbert is a writer and artist living in Brooklyn. Her poems have been nominated for three Pushcarts, and have appeared in journals including Dodging the Rain, Hamilton Stone Review, and The Oddville Press. Her work is forthcoming in Schuylkill Valley Journal, Sparks of Calliope, and Lowestoft Chronicle.