All the tiny stems
are popping right back up
from where my body has just been
alleviating my concerns of killing
what I’ve just recognized, intimately, as a world.
As a world they go on by themselves.
As a wild they do not easily succumb.
Which brings us to an ethics of picking them—
At the moment such a gesture
is the very etymology
of violence—
Which brings us to an ethics of silence,
sparse grackle and a mile-deep breeze
challenging the substance of words—
Which brings us to an ethics of crawling through a hole
in the fence to the other side’s even more orange:
Because we could we did not.
Because we could but did not
we then understood
how indigenously, how to the moment
precisely evolved they are always arising—
the property lines, and pleasures of
/ / abiding them.
Kelly Egan’s poems have appeared in Colorado Review, Laurel Review, RHINO, Denver Quarterly, Luna Luna, BlazeVOX, White Stag, and elsewhere. Her manuscript was recently a finalist in the Midwest Chapbook Contest. She lives in San Francisco and has an MFA in Poetry from Saint
Mary’s College of CA. She likes to think about outer space and visit small towns.
