Pink Ligtning The Broken Wave

Jeannine Savard Pink Lightning              for Borislav We drive straight toward it as if merely for the pleasure of our eyes. Let's say it is a jumpy nerve from the root of a saber-toothed tiger's tooth, and then --- Flash-Charge, a lizard's prodigious tail wriggling against the opening of sky. We let out of ourselves some good short laughs, delight climbing to the tops of our eyebrows, the desert hills, settling there. We keep on looking though for that glimpse of an unspeakably brilliant quetzal feather streaming inside the answer to our own Every Morning Quiz---"Am I happy?" I'm sure that light is the same tongue color as the knotweeds along the roadside, as a coyote's singing in a moonbed, his covenant. Its significance is now a smile coming up surreptitiously from between strong cheekbones, a light brown face -- throw back from the old Thracian's---Gold enthusiastic swimmer in the Black Sea I've been told about, again and again. I am already happy --- thinking how we are going there, how we'll know the water's light at dawn, that pink far above the wood-like-barn discovered recently in a clay matrix on the sea floor, Crow's echo in the prow of the Ark, and hair shed by the many saved at the bottom of our whole world's own giant and forecasted beginning. Broken Wave I'm bearing fresh bread to him in my earrings alone. They are blue moons from Thamel, halved on either side of the question: Can a broken wave make the ocean run dry? In the gut we could think, together we are too much of a good thing. Leaves falling separately from the black walnut tree, an old story I once would live to read. Today though, we will walk together toward the horses, white mares standing in the sun chewing the ground's perishing grass. Our friend distracts us out of the moment, her skeleton too close to her skin. She chooses this, determined spirit of one who excels in the light, starvation near the bevy of chickens belly-flopping in the coop. My anger, my poison rises, scream on the verge for this display, the courting of death like a rooster. . . Staring into the sawdust and stones you see she'd rather have the bones of a man in her hand. We watch her flex and find that except for a cricket she noticed in the grass, she hasn't been with us for years. Jeannine Savard has published two volumes of poetry: Trumpeter and Snow Water Cove. She was awarded the Jerome J. Shestack Prize for poetry from The American Poetry Review, the Carnegie Mellon Poetry Prize, and has published poems in a number of journals such as The North American Review, Ploughshares, Hayden's Ferry Review, and many more.