coda

by LM Brimmer

I walked / the cold pure / lately 
the lake of cedar / I let me 
run / a shore / where the past / tense 
was a brutality / where I found mine
 fondling the mud bank 

I preyed / for another hour / to be wanted 
back / an hour late / for a possibility
for the light to gape / for my debt 
to be swallowed / by the wet of an open cave 

I panted / through the dry red / my tissue torn 
lip-corner bit / but throat-silent in the shimmer  
shake of the evergreen needles / and soon / looming 
beyond my head / the groove of a dusky loop / and you 

again and irridescent / a light on my sacrum 
then holding my hand / my trickling trick-fork 
the mile creek to my heart’s seat / tugging at the form
 of sound from the thicket / a spring / knotted in the forest

 my back / my hiding / against the beach of whispering 
trees / where I can catch / the stoic notes of the indigo bunting 

blue bird / here to return to hunting 
grounds / to return to backwater / hunger 
to my elusive girlhood / its trap-spiral ever 
winding to make whole / winding the river 
from the levee / or lever 

lift me

LM Brimmer is an interdisciplinary artist & educator living on Dakota land in Minneapolis, MN and was a co-editor of the anthology Queer Voices: Poetry, Prose and Pride (MHS Press 2019). Their poetry has appeared in Pleiades, Impossible Archetype, Gasher Journal, Quarterly West and elsewhere. They have work forthcoming from The Colorado Review, Heavy Feather Review and Sonora Review.

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