esrevitlum

it’s sparrow season
and our scripture is written in

all the flowers that have fallen
giving way to seedful pockets
and the colorful dead withering 
against a paragraph of clouds and cold.

let’s live behind pines like a fence
that gates the sky.

let’s gather up the gray birds,
the insistent asters,
and taste the memory of boreal forests gone up in smoke.

we wouldn’t dare scrub the ash and ink from our lips.

we covet as much as we can.

we learned it, in fact,
from the wind jingling the leaves of aspens
like coins
it can’t bear to spend.

it kills us

that the fireflies went dark when we weren’t looking
slaughtered like stars at the edge of the universe.

but we stared as long as we could

greedy as we are
for every photon

desperate as we are
to not be erased.