300 Eggs: She’s Difficult
Ash Wednesday
Because I was a lamb
Box
Catching Up
Cause for Celebration
Extraterrestrial
Grapefruit
Inheritance Rosarium
Jellyfish in Gaza
Night Song
Oklahoma, Blackbirds
Passage
The Well-Armed Women
Oklahoma, Blackbirds
Jana-Lee Germaine
5 a.m., south of Vinita, the red-gold sun
an arched eyebrow on the face
of the horizon. I was leaving
Chicago, leaving my husband,
already far from the paring knife
winged across my skin,
from hands that clamped
my jaw and returned hours later
with a dozen yellow roses.
His voice trailed my little truck
like litter on the highway,
but I was hell-bent for cactus forests
and a desert to be lost in.
As I drove, a hinge of sky swung open,
the dark road lifted,
and birds with scarlet-flashed feathers
unfurled toward heaven.
Hundreds swirled above my truck.
Soon they would scatter across the fields
and fence posts, leaving me
still pointed south,
with only the ghost of sun on the road.
Yet for a minute, I was one
who traveled with a canopy of birds.