C.L. O'Dell
All at the same time a boy was falling out of his mother’s arms
like a pit out of some half-eaten fruit,
you were invisible, wrestling a turkey blinded by a pellet
from a single-shot shotgun
and a Labrador dragged through roadside trash and bottles,
hinged by a car, his sockets out of grip
and his eyes in loss of page numbers. At the same time
a skinny fellow was plowing his last breath with fire
through the dim, wet hallway of a trumpet
and a girl was pirouetting in a field of grass, her fingertips healing the sky,
and I was listening to thunder, calculating how far
away a storm was after lightning hit, thinking that under each slab
of darkness, an infant bit of light was still learning how to turn
into nothing.