Plastic Bag Caught in a Tree
Some dark animal’s
sloughed-off skin.
Bit of the night sky
snagged on a limb.
Black as a lung that wheezes
in the oil-thick breeze.
Eyeless hood,
shroud, or veil. Yesterday, a caught
paratrooper cut the cords
and fell through the branches,
leaving behind his chute.
The snagged soul
can never quite escape,
so the wind makes a flag of it,
makes a black thought of it.
We are bags filled with bones
and blood. I couldn’t stop thinking
and then my thought slipped out,
and now look—it’s rippling
in the high branches.
Plume: Issue #38 August 2014