swan
Nolan Liebert
Your shirt was black-crow, like
your hair, like
your boots and the secrets they carried,
but your smile-sound was ten suns –
a million lux exploding
at once, too much to hold in
a single mouth, you shared yours with me
in frets and wet, pink, strawberry muscle,
sharp like a war-needle
in my throat, the wind spoke silent oaths –
and for all the stars between your lips,
I did not see the shadows,
the circling birds, I could not augur
the weather of weapons, and you,
you did not hear, you roared
your own black song in the red wound-sea,
and began the long swim from your bath
down the swan-road,
and the dress you wore was black-crow, like
my mouth.
Nolan Liebert hails from the Black Hills where he lives with his wife and children in a house, not a covered wagon. His proximity to the Sanford Underground Research Facility feeds his obsession with dark matter, as his farmboy roots fed his obsession with plants, herbs, and alchemy. His literary experiments appear or are forthcoming in An Alphabet of Embers, Zetetic: A Record of Unusual Inquiry, and elsewhere. You can find him editing Pidgeonholes or on twitter @nliebert.