The Fiddleback

Little White Crosses

Poetry by Donavon Davidson

Listen Here

First kisses given, bees take

when they disappear,

and, when dying of boredom,

the bullet.

Having nothing to sweeten our coffee,

having no apples to speak of,

we open the black mouth

to a long factory,

and everything made comes out

thin shadowed in ditches

before the sun rises.

Vein of alley light,

open a boy’s head.

Stain a girl’s lips green.

A landscape of tiny crosses

is hypnotized by a marching band

cleaning the streets

of birds and sickly coughs.

And the rain has yet to come

with its book dedicated to

tragic love.

The major earthquake is long overdue.

Landslides are expected.

This is a home

sliding off a cliff.

This is a child

desiring greener seas.

Every day is an exercise in silence,

every body, practicing a private death

quietly in an apple’s

tiny cross,

hiding in what’s red and sweet.

A wooden horse

has been placed beneath our window,

waiting for a man dressed in animal skins

to stop hunting

the enormous shadow of night.

It’s been wanting to open for years,

along with the lighthouse

of a firefly

buried in the glass jar of my headache,

and the white egg

continuously falling in your hip.

When the music’s over

we might as well invent a fire

so someone will see.

It’s about to rain on us

or become entirely too dark.

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Donavon’s poems have appeared, or are soon to appear, in: Prick of the Spindle, Oak Bend Review, Juked, Pirene’s Fountain, The Montucky Review, Spork, 3:AM, Anti-, Arch, Anemone Sidecar, Pedestal, WordRiot, MiPOesias, Stirring, Evergreen Review, Barnwood, and many others. He received his MFA from Goddard and currently lives in Vermont where he teaches writing at the Community College of Vermont.