Robin Turner
In a World All but Buried
in tin cans & cellophane, in cigarette butts & chewing gum, in Big Gulp cups after the big gulp, forgive me. Forgive me for mistaking a wadded tissue tossed into leaf litter for a perfect puff of cloud fallen from the sky. It floated me all the way home.
a forest grew
A forest grew in me. Backroads & birdsong, gravel & ghosts, Jesus blue-eyed from the billboards—Choose ye! Heaven or Hell. A forest grew. Through the rounds of each season, flooding & gutting me, vision & viscera. O relentless pine. You needled me to bleeding. Held me awkward in your rough-barked arms, like a mother not yet ready to mother, like a judge. And I your recalcitrant, your fractured & fractious child, wild for you & against you, away from you, away, to anywhere—Choose ye!—but here.
how it happens
I am already two miles in, a half-woman half-walking, when the crows on Galemeadow greet me, loud & raucous & funny. My early-morning familiars. One lifts the last remnants of sleep from my lids. One shakes the night’s dreams from my hair. Another caw-coaxes my ears into hearing, attunes me anew to each day. They unnest me, remake me, wake me alive & crow whole. Then they send me back home on two stumbling feet to my troubled & tender own kind.
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Robin Turner’s poems, prose poems, and flash fiction have appeared in DMQ Review, Rattle, Rust + Moth, The Texas Observer, Bracken Magazine, and elsewhere in print and online. Her chapbooks are Elegy with Clouds & (forthcoming from Kelsay Books) and bindweed & crow poison (Porkbelly Press). She is a poetry reader for Sugared Water and a teaching artist for the Writer’s Garret in Dallas, Texas.