Rebekah Remington

Nest

Deep inside the vine-choked rhododendron
            a robust nest
                        occupied by a dark bird.

Every day for a week, semi-hidden, the bird brooded.
                        Then gone, gone
                                    without a fledgling.

When I leave the yard I don’t wander far.
I wear a mask.
I am living inside a plague.

It’s hard to say what it is like.
            Fat magnolias are in bloom.
First, on tv I watched a hospital in a distant country

going up at lightning speed.
            All across the world ships, unpermitted
                        to dock, languished in harbors.

Passengers, bored and afraid, sent photos of themselves.
            Then schools closed, the cafes closed, the theaters.
                        Each time I arrive home

I check for the bird
            knowing it’s gone.
Most of my dreams involve grocery stores.
 

Delivery from H

After Michael Palmer

Certain truths weigh more than others
If she drank a glass of vodka for instance
The leaden sky opened itself to strangers
The field today yes and no

Nothing but bills and catalogs beside the window
He roams with hands open to trap the sun
She paints an abandoned moon bounce in a gray yard
Nothing has happened since October but a barely visible web

In the basement he dreamt he saw four crows lost in the atrium
Is that flood a metaphor
Yachts on the surface signifying an Old World vagary
Looking for love between the flotsam and jellyfish

Lit by lucerne lamps
(Wind tearing westward)
For a long time nothing arrived
Then a scrimshaw box containing nothing
 

Rebekah Remington has appeared in AGNI online, Blackbird, Gargoyle, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Linebreak, Ninth Letter, Smartish Pace and elsewhere. Her chapbook Asphalt (CityLit 2013) was selected by Marie Howe for the Clarinda Harris Poetry Award.