EMMA AYLOR

Passage

It was raining just a minute ago. As

it started I thought wet link fence, thought

toward you gone again. I don’t know you,

morning smoke in bare legs and coat with me

taking the opposite roadside saying

walk cold heels and dropping pastry flake on the brick.

Or you, who lettered the sign driving south, told us

WE HAVE JACKETS but also PRAY. Your shoulder, which

was hard leaning on the bus window, which was blurred

warmer, lace-dropped water with all of that

breath. I wanted a person to take my

picture, wanted you, old egg, good soul.

Anne Birdie

Every train is built of continuous arrival; someone

is always getting home. I sit there daily,

a tuck in my chest, the sky tender between

Carvel and the taco shop, the rooftop graffiti

under my seat saying twice daily I love you Anne Birdie.

I have pictured her,

everything she says a bath of both other and home,

sitting on porches and having something to do with the weather,

mixed smoke and copper stains banding her fingers.

I have only lived here a little and every day I am already leaving,

sifting deli receipts and replaying conversations one neighbor

had with another through their kitchen windows, lemon zest

and yeasted air carried to me standing loosehanded

on the sidewalk. My mother had five daughters, one said.

Emma Aylor is the author of Twos (Dancing Girl Press, 2014) and an MFA candidate in poetry at the University of Washington. Her poems have appeared in Handsome, the Adirondack Review, Two Serious Ladies, Vinyl, and elsewhere.