Alecia Beymer

CULLING LINES

I’ve noticed the dismantling of winter,
how birds descend on my street calling out 
to one another. My body splinters into chills, want 
of warmth in the air. 

I find my friend, near the bright patio chairs,
acquiesced to the lawn. Diffused of promise,
he bends grass petals in his palms, says he has learned 
the contours of disconnection as I sit beside him. 

We spend all our time traipsing under suns 
from one place to another, and I don’t know 
about you, reader, but I can’t pull my soul through 
my throat when I’m near you. I depart from myself daily. 

Tree shadows swell the river. We devour 
the soft collapse of birds -- how the silence 
feels like leaves falling, their curation resounding 
in the wind around us. Sometimes a voice 
calls out like loss, like two hands unclasping.  

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.