My chest is full of branches.
They are woven together in a
basket of black mud and asteroid.
It’s a nest that still glows with
strands of cosmos tangled in.
This bird that builds it has feathers
the size of car hoods.  He’s half
owl, half comet tail.  He was raised
by a pack of subterranean desert
coyotes.  His mouth is claw machine
and firemen shoulder.  He fills this
heart with all that it needs.  Velcro
shoes and middle school retainers,
mixtape envelopes, and storage
shed sweaters.  A junkyard water
wheel keeps it all humming.  He
drug it in his beak til his back bent
to cane hook.  He still flies a little
crooked from it.  There is an entire church
inside .  The stones were dropped piece
by piece, the altar was first.  I was so
quiet then.  I was being remodeled into
a choir of pipe organs.  I was a floor plan
for a grace I hadn’t welcomed yet.  This
church has a bell that rings everyday at
3 in the morning.  Three times it rings,
“it’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay.”  It sounds
like my grandmother’s voice.  The voice
I can never remember hard as I try.  There
is a river in this cadio-nest of knots the bird
can’t dam, hard as he tries.  When this bell
rings it throws fists.  It’s the uncoiled garden
hose, the petals in hail storm, the soil thrown
from the pots.  The bird cries out, the song
of every book in the library closing.  He pulls
entire shipyards into the river’s mouth, fills
its belly with elephants and steam engines.
He builds a track for a bullet train that whistles
my mother’s favorite lullabies.  He finds every
penny I’ve ever thrown in a fountain, and covers
the rails.  They’re flattened into the shape of all
the love letters I wished I’d gotten.  This bird,
grows so tired.  This bird doesn’t rest.  This bird
still pains for the fall of Atlantis.  This bird keeps
that dirty chewed music box of ivy and arrowhead
wound so tight in my chest.

(Source: hitrecord.org)