Outside the clinic, a northern mockingbird
is poised on the proscenium of a lamp post
belting every note he knows, a shrill symphony
of ringtones, car alarms, some dozen other birds
whose voices he’s taken for his own.
Who hasn’t pled to the guileless sky,
tried every trick in the book to strike  
the right note and call gladness home?
I’ve stopped believing there’s something for me
in blue hydrangea hemming the lot like pompoms,
the scent of fry oil wafting hot on the breeze.
Still, here I am returned to the needle’s dizzying
intrusion, the drug-spun dreaming that once
pulled me from the brink, though it's lost its teeth
and I wake with grief still thick on my tongue.
Driving home, the road shimmers beneath
a lingering gloss, kudzu choking the pines,
slung over telephone wires like a sheet
draped over the mess of an attic, chair legs
and boxes amassing to a specter before
a switched light cleaves reason from darkness.
Summer is the greenest haunting,
every bright recollection returned a little wrong:
days quicker to dim, fruit grown bitter,
this rampant leafing so like madness,
a pitiless and creeping thing; it takes the shape
of all it touches, leaves nothing untouched.

—Zoe Boyer

Poet’s Website

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