by Erin Wilson

My mother did not bear me to metaphysical platitudes.

She pushed me out like a package through her purple crucifix,

her luxurious black fur a bramble at earth's door.

I spend my years recycling energy through this flesh flap.

And yet somewhere in the branches of the greenish-white sycamore

that grows stubbornly from the crescent of my mind, sings a bird.

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Erin Wilson has contributed poems to The Adirondack Review, San Pedro River Review, Split Rock Review, and Minola Review, with work forthcoming from The American Journal of Poetry, Juked, and Kestrel. She lives and writes in a small town in northern Ontario, Canada.