by Erin Wilson

It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIMEvery Day's archives!

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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's poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Manhattan Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, Bear Review, Sugar House Review, Tar River Poetry, Lake Effect, Verse Daily, Pembroke, and elsewhere internationally. Her first collection is At Home with Disquiet; her second, Blue (whose title poem won a Pushcart), is about depression, grief, and the transformative power of art. She lives in a small town on Robinson-Huron Treaty Territory, in Northern Ontario, Canada, the traditional lands of the Anishnawbek, devoted to a handful of things, all of them poetry. Some of her best friends are trees. She refuses to carry a cell phone.

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.