W. Todd Kaneko
ELEGY FULL OF ANIMAL PARTS
My heart is a nest for your shadow, clear
November for a swag of black feathers
against snow. My oven is that hollow
where sorrow bursts with fat, where grief is
cavitied for flesh. Prayer makes us
explain ourselves to ourselves, crows
jagged where we once had canary song
because our hearts make up a forest,
deciduous where we gather, pigeon dark
for the frost. The woods are full of animal
sounds—donkey bray, hog bawl, that scrape
of tongue against uvula, tooth against stone
for tender sparks. You are hooves and hair.
You are vertebrae and memory of hot breath
because my heart is a tongue of flame, tiny
where it has settled into this wreath of awful
bones—nowhere to go, nothing but sleep
now that the antler is free of the buck,
the wing is free of the sky and flesh
is free from the spirit, from the spit,
from the mouth that that has promised
to swallow us all back into the earth.
W. Todd Kaneko is the author of the poetry books This Is How the Bone Sings and The Dead Wrestler Elegies. He is co-author with Amorak Huey of the poetry chapbook Slash/Slash and Poetry: A Writers’ Guide and Anthology. His poems have appeared in Poetry, Alaskan Quarterly Review, Massachusetts Review, The Normal School, Barrelhouse, Verse Daily, Poetry Daily, the American Academy of Poets Poem-A-Day, and elsewhere. A Kundiman Fellow, he lives with his family in Grand Rapids, Michigan where he teaches at Grand Valley State University.
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