Christine Boyer | Little Losses
A sun-blind canary flew into my windowpane today.
I cupped it in my palms like a citron before I buried it today.
The rolling hills, the green hummocks, have all been razed.
Identical brown houses, cloned, stand in rows there today.
The woman begging on the Red Line gave her spiel in our car.
Everyone looked down at their phones today.
“They’re watching us,” my dad mutters, his eyes darting and small.
The conspiracy theorists bleat and wail on his screen today.
The sun falls like a stone behind the skyline, a blue gloaming.
Another loss, one less day – it’s gone now, today.
Our cells turnover. It takes the hippocampus twenty years to change.
My memory center from when I was eighteen is gone today.
And I, Christine, could dwell on the little losses, or wail.
But the losses conceive little shoots and buds – today.
I cupped it in my palms like a citron before I buried it today.
The rolling hills, the green hummocks, have all been razed.
Identical brown houses, cloned, stand in rows there today.
The woman begging on the Red Line gave her spiel in our car.
Everyone looked down at their phones today.
“They’re watching us,” my dad mutters, his eyes darting and small.
The conspiracy theorists bleat and wail on his screen today.
The sun falls like a stone behind the skyline, a blue gloaming.
Another loss, one less day – it’s gone now, today.
Our cells turnover. It takes the hippocampus twenty years to change.
My memory center from when I was eighteen is gone today.
And I, Christine, could dwell on the little losses, or wail.
But the losses conceive little shoots and buds – today.
Christine Boyer has been published in “the Little Patuxent Review,” “the Tahoma Literary Review,” and “So It Goes: the Literary Journal of the Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library,” among others. She is a student with Harvard University Extension School and lives in Massachusetts. Her website can be found at www.christine-boyer.com.