Jacob Strautmann – What’s left

…It seems your mother is not your mother,
You are not you, home is an alien land. – Pasternak

Every earring, every hole-punched penny,
and feathers blowing from the open coop
wake in a half-mask of light sharp as seeds.
Here was another language: red circle, rusted
square wrote fallow; a zipper of bones
made bird, her little faces inside out,
like white cornhusks blistering our farm
the ridge-cap heals under. Another run,

a turn, there was nothing to forgive,
precambrian death magnificently still
but for the moon, that living pockmark,
stitching it all back, pulling bare the threaded night.
When the curtain shook, the wind was rising.
When I said parents, I meant topography.