Instructions
(Not Answers)
For Donna Wise Coombs
*Why Death?*
You are asking the wrong question. Pay attention: stay amazed.
For example, spring: you say it is renewal
but it is actually science fiction, an uncanny valley,
the closest the botanical comes to flesh.
Look: the buds pop out of acid-yellow and poison-green stems,
fake-looking, false; and then pass for fur, kittens, rabbits.
Feel the skin on the pale leaves that sprout, this morning,
soft and curiously warm as a palm.
Note that the air is no temperature: that breeze is breath.
Put your ear to the ground and shiver at the stones' shuddering pulses.
Trace the skein back. Enumerate, detail.
Attend within. This, is It.
Maria Berardi’s work has appeared in local and national magazines and online (13 Magazine, Voca Femina, Mothering, The Opiate, getborn and most recently Twyckenham Notes). Berardi’s first collection, Cassandra Gifts, was published in 2013 by Turkey Buzzard Press, and is currently at work on a a collection called Pagan. Berardi lives in the Front Range foothills west of Denver at precisely 8,888 feet above sea level .