NELLE 7 | 2024
—on a line by Pablo Neruda
Two immense blackbirds, two cannons:
too many things in twos split by a dark thick
filmstrip: cleave between body and screen.
A life writ with feathers, with gunpowder
that fizzles or explodes sending scattershot
into phoenix. We myth-make beak into beam:
a black seam up a burlesque dancer’s leg:
a powder keg of jazzed choreography.
Was it blackbird or mesh stocking? Church
canon or copulation fainting into blur?
We rapunzel a raven-haired braid
down a cathedral. Cabernet our way
not home but toward an ideal highway
though it’s just another dividing line
another two-lane blacktop spined together
in painted vertebrae. We cage the bird, cut
the hand to fodder. We arrive
halfway which means we never arrive.