Lindsay Wilson
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When the robin returns to the old eves of the newly painted house, and must build a new nest, when you wake at night with a dry throat, your body hot in its loose skin, your wife sighing through the fever sheets, when that lone robin in your eves calls out cheer up, cheer up, and then tuck, tuck, tuck, when you crack the blinds between you and she calls warning, but you hear bewilder, bewilder, bewilder, when, behind her, the dry lightning flashes in the distance where at daybreak you walk the dog along the wetlands, when you consider dandelion leaves for salads, and cattail roots for roasting, when the newsfeed says they found a new Black boy on the roadside, his exit wounds ringed with flies, when the apologies begin, and men who sleep with their rifles climb the Capitol steps, remember the calls in the suddenly leaved trees, remember even before us songs rustled in the foliage unfurling without us, remember to kneel in the scattered egg shells of the season, remember to hold the one who fell instead of flew. |
Lindsay Wilson is the former Poet Laureate of Reno, Nevada, and he has served as Editor for The Meadow since 2006. He has published six chapbooks, and his first collection, No Elegies, won the Quercus Review Press Spring Book Award. His writing has appeared in The Colorado Review, Fourth Genre, The Carolina Quarterly, Verse Daily, and The Missouri Review Online. His next full length collection, The Day Gives Us so Many Ways to Eat, is forthcoming from WordTech Editions in Fall 2022.