home

new submissions

bookstore

opportunities

literary links

events

mfa

about the muse

contact the muse

poems by

branden boyer

Wing

A bird's wing on the wet driveway
And no bird, halved, searching for
a needle and thread

The girl washing her car steps
over it, around it, her feet are
ice cream they can't get dirty
like that
She needs to keep them
pink-flavored

I look down at the bones, like
fine-dining fork tongs between
the brown feathers

and wonder what you would
find in the cemetery if
graves could grow their own
flowers, leave clues like this

Favorite teapots springing
from the mounds, or proud
flags from home countries taking root
and blossoming. Old boyfriends bending
up from the soil and unfolding their
petals in long-remembered perfume

I look up at the girl,
her ponytail full of suds like
a coral reef begging
for a tug

I search her shoulder for
a spot of blood, hoping
to see a tiny wound, brown
feathers stuck
in the wet

Today, murder

Today, murder is insistent. At
the construction site it glints in
every element: the salt-edged sting
of electric saw on air, the metallic
tingling of power tools burning
their juice in high voices, the firm
smack-punch bone crack of
the truck's door slamming.

Funeral hushes follow. Over
head a plane wails in a hollow
breeze that strokes soft,
chilly like tomb air. A tree
shivers from the ground, its
leaves rustling must of old
shrouds, of stirring dust.

Through it all, children on
the grass yelp yellows and
pinks, delighting in the warm
songs of each others' breath,
seeming to not notice that
today, the birds talk in short
cracks that singe and seep
metal. Today, even the birds
have guns in their throats.

Last Act

I don't know why they picked me to do it. I'm
not a priest. It's like our family began to write
its own Catholicism as its generations unfolded
across the earth, Poland to the ocean to America's
east to California, where my own mother baptized
me in our bathtub, to my great-grandmother's room,
where I stood, fourteen, vial of holy water in hand
over Bachi's body.

I don't know why they picked me to do it. I didn't
even like her. Had hated her, almost: her selfishness,
the way she wouldn't ever just talk to a little kid, only
give orders, a list of favors enforced
by guilt.

One night, she had simply leaned over
while sitting at her table, and never
breathed again, no one there to see
it happen.

Paramedics came for nothing, laid her
on the floor for nothing, covered her
with a blanket for nothing: the motions
the living go through for the dead. And
now, this last movement, and me,
the elected dancer. "Just say a prayer and
anoint her," my grandmother told me.

Now me, alone
in the room, my first dead body. Me, not
even sure I wanted to believe in something
like God, not sure I knew how to send someone
to Heaven. But I knelt at her shoulder, her skin
going blue already, a lake freezing from
the bottom up. I wet
my fingers with the chilly, blessed water. Her
brow already was marked: a deepening blot
of purple, a bruise from that laying her head
onto the table, her body's last act
of injury. I drew
the cross there, leaving two
streaks of shining wet on her skin, exactly where
she had ordered, exactly why she had
picked me.