ALICE BOLIN

Landscape: stages

I traced a facsimile
on a sheet of graph paper:

the boreal forest. A field loud
with colorless birds. Delirious

as a midnight locomotive,
mood ring, you should be afraid

of me. Faithfully, faithfully,
I have fed on regrets

and reddened sentiments, a season
like the strain of a canary

in the apartment next door.
What regrets. A sense of the public

contracting like a woman’s chest.
My most brutal loneliness,

those fields ripping by
the covered wagon. Last night

under the stage lights,
I was taken by bare resignation,

a new fault line craning inside me.
To keep from crying, I considered you

a frontier, a fallowed wing.
I bit my lip into a talisman.