Darkness Descends // When Berryman Died // Migration
Darkness Descends
In cut offs & a Mother Jones T-shirt
you flip eggs over hard angling the cast
iron inches above the flame
burn your fingers I rub E
on blisters wrap them in gauze
Hana you whisper I’m too sick to love
stretch across my honeycomb quilt
spitting words like tree roots tasted
after days of Adriamycin—
liquid poison pouring through veins
into the River Styx
When Berryman Died
He left his shoes, scuffed loafers,
on the bridge. A cordovan pair
he could have shed
anywhere: at the university,
beside his desk, under Tate’s coffee table,
at the foot of a lover’s bed.
Every night he thought, tomorrow.
Mornings, he remembered
his suit at the cleaners, his essay
on Marlowe, students waiting
outside his office. January 7
reasons ran dry.
He bathed and trimmed his beard
putting on a new shirt.
In eight degrees he walked
to the bridge.
Migration
She finds a dead hawk body’s still warm
drops him in her brown backpack
like a winged warrior raises her arms
to migrate with the untethered
and takes off
to preserve the remains
careful as a shaman
she washes him bone by bone
douses quills in alcohol
stores his down in a cedar box
invokes his spirit to stay seven days
until the body is at rest
Chella Courington (she/her) is a writer and teacher whose poetry and fiction appear in numerous anthologies and journals including DMQ Review, The Los Angeles Review, and New World Writing. Nominated for Pushcart, Best of the Net, and Best New Poets, Courington was raised in the Appalachian south and lives in California.
