The Cold That Settles Lifts

That poor cadaver resting
in the dissection lab
might be in her sixties.
But the skin over her ribs,

peeled neatly back,
looks like a young cormorant
ascending from a saltmarsh.

In order to really see her head 
haloed by lank hair shot with silver,
eyelids as thin as onion skin,
I have to drown out the brutal chatter 
of other biology students
circling the table.
And when I palm her liver,
passed to me like a sacrament tray,
I find its weight

contains a waning glory. 
We are young,
some of us just beginning 
to fall in love, our hopes pinioned
by that withered red knot
slick with glycerin. Some of us
think we’re ready to see her dead body

but when the sheets
are pulled clear,
the backward hush 
of revelation is like holding
a nest of fledglings in our mouths.
So that years later,

when I lay my hand
upon my father's still breast,
fingers unfolding
across his burial whites, 
I will think I hear
the babble of many voices,
or a murmuration of starlings
lifting in flight.

The Vessel and the Emanation

I buried the last duck beneath the red cedar
where the raccoon caught her

spading her slender bill in the dark soil.

She had wandered for two days,
confused by a sudden lonesomeness,
after her last companion died from a neck wound,

the infection so rapid
she’d unfurled her black wings once
and could not fold them up.

When the nesting crows called to the last duck
she would call back to them. 
Each sound sought its sister sound
and returned to her,

hollow and hungry.
If I made a list of all the things I cannot save

it would begin with you and me,
the ducks, and the garlic harvest,

money, time, my breath, 
which escaped my body
like a damask ribbon when I found her,
meat torn from her breast,

spine visible
and as milky 
as a strand of baby teeth.

Her delicate head, a tendril of smoke
tangled in the morning glory.

ALLISA CHERRY

Allisa Cherry was born and raised in the rural southwest of the United States. She has since relocated to Portland, Oregon, where she works as a writing tutor and small-scale urban farmer and has recently completed an MFA in poetry at Pacific University. Her work has received Pushcart Prize nominations from San Pedro River Review and High Desert Journal, and is forthcoming in The Westchester Review and Tar River Poetry.