Alecia Beymer

EMERALD ISLE, NC

I once believed in the silence
of margins, the ripeness
of baby bird flesh, the dismantling
of words, the foraging
of sea cicadas and the dust
of sighs. What I am trying to say is: 

everything is wrong and I can’t lift
praise on my tongue or coil
it in my collar bone. In child form: 
this hunger, scanning the shore for holes
of breath and then unearthing,
with both hands, the fragile sea cicada, 

holding its scampering
fear, delivering it to a bucket
where a fisherman would hook 
its life to a rod. 
Or this: the ways I intended to save 
baby birds thrust from their nests,  

my human touch exacting the absence
of foamy feathers. I believed
in the curious grace of preservation.  

But even now: this thin marrow
of faith, this clawing 
of a warm body, this surrender;
feather, shell, breath. 

Alecia Beymer is a doctoral student in English Education at Michigan State University. Her poems have been published in Bellevue Literary Review and The Minor Bird. Her research is focused on literacies formed by space and place, considerations of the interconnected resonances of teachers and students, and the poetics of education.