THE PROTHONOTARY WARBLE
What does yellow sound like
in the drizzle-grey of spring?
In the drizzle-grey it springs sweet-sweet,
the song of the prothonotary warbler
dazzles in Byzantine gold of the prothonotary.
The recorder of the court buries a tiny bird,
buries a tiny bird in a long Latin name.
It cannot prop up the fragile head.
The fragile head cannot prop up
our human hopes rising in yellow bursts.
Long lenses of the Central Park birders rise
for its small sun sweet above the swamp
grasses, above the new-greens
what does yellow sound like?
ODE TO NAIL CLIPPINGS
How
we contain our wild.
Big cats sharpen theirs on trees
most handy. Where to
be-
gin?
Left-handedness makes
me start right. Unlike the cats
mine do not retract.
I
need
a clipper tender
as a tiller in my grip.
The internet’s full
of
ad-
vice: the u-shape of
cuticle should be reflect-
ed by the top of
the
nail
to make an oval
like a mirror to hang in
the hall. I do yo-
ga
to
strengthen my toe-hold
for toenails thicken. I think
What Will Become of
Me?
by
artist Adrian
Piper, honey jars of her
fingernails in MOMA
hang
in-
serting her body
into the collection, her
cremains will fill the
last
jar.
My daughter’s once ti-
ny nails made me quiver to
cut. Always a drop
of
blood,
but she clips her boys’
neatly. Will she let mine be
long, let my wild un-
loose?
WAYS OF GRIEVING
Tossed like the twenty you hallelujah into a sax player’s case outside your coffee shop.
On a couch in the sun porch listening to light rain all night.
Wearing the three rings she was last wearing.
Slicing both sides of each membrane of a grapefruit like she did.
On the dock after it rains your aunt finds a dry white feather.
A handwritten note to herself about your step-brother: Tim looks like Ben Affleck.
What the checks next to half the names in her address book mean.
The impenetrable geography of the LIRR on July 4th weekend does not rattle you.
Like a car ferry without any cars.
Watching Muzzy struggle to get all four legs up the steps.
Like paddling against the wind on the windiest day.
Wish for more time ten years ago.
Photo of a fish skeleton on a black sand beach in Greece.
Like the question mark blinking on your computer’s black screen.
Like falling from a huge bird’s nest in a tall pine tree.
Lost in the forest of her green bedroom walls.
Like the white flare of a deer tail.
Chocolate pudding for me, vanilla for her.
You will not kill the fly buzzing around your bathroom.
Like the mystery of the cottony fluff in Lowell Holly woods.
In a still pond the plash of a fish surfacing or a bird diving.
Like you just left her womb and everything is a first.
Sarah Key’s work includes cookbooks, essays on the Huffington Post, and dozens of poems in print and online, including anthologies such as Nasty Women Poets, American Writers Review 2020, and Greening the Earth. Her poems have appeared in The Georgia Review, Calyx, Poet Lore, Minerva Rising, and Tuesday; An Art Project. After studying poetry at the Frost Place, Cave Canem, and the Unterberg Poetry Center, she serves as the Hostos Writing Center Poet-in-Practice, creating workshops and mentoring tutors at a community college in the South Bronx.