for Bernice Gardner, may she RIP
Ringed around the rosy twilight park,
A cocoon on a leaf falls through the dark.
It lands on wet asphalt streets above the bulwark
of a destiny nonexistant beneath arcs of light.
The last fault on earth to rattle – a quake
upsets a cistern and a plinth to commemorate
a place of birth, cracked open, a snake’s
egg-tooth chips its shell slowly away.
Don’t ask me for directions, because I left
the atlas on my earlobe; we are cold, bereft
but sentient beings. At last the fear folds
in envelopes and flies down like a paper plane.
Where your blind eye waxes, and my good eye wanes
we read each other’s eyes, and discard the remains.
After your stroke, words tumble out hodge-podge
I’d like to be even-keeled, but fly in the face of odds.
Death is a parenthesis of life, waiting around a corner;
organs in coolers make it difficult to mourn here.
The building’s intestines shudder, grind to a halt
tines rattle on plates, the gravity of pepper and salt
and sickness and health, to each we lend an ornery ear
to hear past the clutter, sequester it in a vault.
At your bedside, later that night, I opened the window
in flew a butterfly, powdered wings twitching to and fro.
Trevor Cunnington is a queer and neurodivergent writer/artist/educator who lives in Toronto. Their work has appeared in Open Arts Forum, Poetry Super Highway, Cerasus, Maisonneuve, and various anthologies. Additionally, they have work forthcoming in Last Leaves, Radon, Inlandia, Word For/Word, The Orchards Poetry Review, and The Rivanna Review. You can find them on instagram @trevorcunnington and on twitter @trevorcunning.
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