Elizabeth Vignali

Unbraked, Reeling

I started running again
the day after the anniversary of your death,
having remembered that I want to live

to see my own someday grandkids grow up.
You would have liked the many stretchings of wings—
the cormorant shaking out her wet feathers,

the red-winged blackbird singing his fool heart out.
A loon took off, needing half the lake-length to rise
high enough to clear the trees. They get stuck,

sometimes, loons. If they land on too small a body
of water. I’m stuck, now, with your secret
I’ve carried for fifteen years. Its weight is lighter here

in the silver drizzle and soft mallard chatter
as the mother ducks lead fledglings from shore
and teach them how to dive 

and dozens of buffleheads, flocculent, magnetic,
slide like game tokens across the flat board of pond
as if someone else were choosing their moves.

Musical Anhedonia Without Brain Damage

She must find other ways to elicit goosebumps:
fingers speared into rich, chilly soil at dawn,
rosemary & lemon balm crushed against her lips,
the last slash of sunset on a stormy day.
Her friends insist she must feel less alive—
How are you not dancing right now? they cry
when their favorite tune comes on.
Sometimes she’ll sway her hips agreeably,
still baffled, notes like a thousand beetles
rattling in her brain. She likes music,
she says with an asterisk—she just doesn’t like
the way it sounds. Like auditory astigmatism,
warping the world’s soundwaves. 
But she likes what it does for others. 
She watches the fine hairs rise on her lover’s neck
when the opening squeal of Rhapsody in Blue
rises like a hawk. But she—she prefers the actual hawk,
its wail dropped like a white stone to her ear.

Back to Issue XI…