Confession

I did not want to write this poem. I’m sick of the street
lined with cotton-candy blossoms, how their scent douses
my clothes when I pass, their skin-thin petals all fuss and flutter.

I’m done trying to describe what spring does to the eye—
how it expects the pupil to swallow the tree’s scaffold
and curve, the slope of muscle from crown to crotch.

I’m over what it might mean when my daughters find
a wing-cricked sparrow in my driveway, its pinprick
wounds nothing like starlight reversed.

Who cares how quickly the storm stuffed the sky
with its charcoal clouds, pattered my daughters,
who were worried about the sparrow, with pellets of pearl.

Wait. Let’s be clear. I’m trying to use the right words
for things—too much pain erupts when we mistake
one thing for another. It was hail, not pearls—

just what happens when updrafts whisk water drops
high enough to freeze, but can’t bear the weight
of what they’ve become.

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Kami Westhoff is the author of the story collection, The Criteria, and three poetry chapbooks including Sleepwalker, the winner of the 2016 Dare to Be Contest from Minerva Rising Press. Her work has appeared in such journals as Carve, Meridian, Third Coast, Hippocampus, Booth, Redivider, and West Branch. She teaches creative writing at Western Washington University in Bellingham, WA.