Brandon Morti ~ Bittersweet

Hope is the thing with feathers, the fist of a house-
hold god held to the blazing sky of Hiroshima,

mon amour, my careful ever. I can’t tell this lonesomeness
from the one it’s replacing, its heft and harrow: a hawk

with a husband in its cast bronze hands, the missing quiver:
the hypotenuse between us never seemed so calculable

as when your body, my urn of ashes, bobbed out of reach
on the swollen Mersey river. Hendiadys, bowed bent like a hatchet

who lives it over by living back: let me tell you about perforation.
I am a badly drawn creature washed up on a littered shore

and hope is the shells, small and cool, into which we hermits
each morning retract the startling need of our claws.

The Abasement of the Northmores by Michael D. Snediker

Happy Sunday.

Pavane pour une infante défunte by Maurice Ravel