DustLore, No. 35
A man at a diner says, Never read
the newspaper, and continues to drink
his coffee and draw circles on want
ads. No one is walking out, every bird
in the state is regressing. They forgot
how to perch, slept in fields, blocked
the roads so The Leavers could not
leave for fear of flattening. They forget
feathers and abandon flight midsky,
plummet. The sound of a chest
cavity crumbling can be confused
with the explosion of a dirt clod
until you witness the liquification. No
one is walking out, the sky’s in the middle
of descent. A man at a diner laughs,
says, See, they’ll prolly say it hasn’t rained
in months.
Anthony Cody is the author of Borderland Apocrypha (March 2020), winner of the 2018 Omnidawn Open Book Prize. A CantoMundo fellow, he is an editor with Noemi Press, and a fellow in Juan Felipe Herrera's Laureate Lab. His poetry has appeared in Gulf Coast, Ninth Letter, TriQuarterly, among other journals.
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