Jessica Baldanzi

Rough Beast Flies

Ghosting our age, Yeats has been tweeted down:
a clutch of letters and a grumpy mug, 

128 characters preserved
on famousprophets dot com. The falcon’s 

been grounded, poisoned by lead shot lodged
in the flesh of its prey. In the reeds where it fished 

float halves of a plastic ball—bright trash,
blue like a robin’s egg, but the size 

of a diviner’s cloudy globe. Launched
and lost by a child, it must have frozen, 

thawed, and frozen again to split
in two. Some kind of beast burst out, 

took to the air. Only satellites know
to where. Not Bethlehem, Dublin, Coole, 

or Innisfree. Here on this rounded
earth, we raise umbrellas against 

the rain of data dislodged as that dark form
pumps and wings through bright black skies.

I’ve set my phone to wake me when it lands.

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Jessica Baldanzi’s writing has appeared in publications from Booth to Genders and she blogs about comics and graphic novels at commonscomics.com. She enjoys the challenge of writing in multiple genres, and just published a lit crit book about female and nonbinary bodies in comics. She has recently refocused her attention on poetry after co-writing an epistolary (and decidedly anti-maudlin) manuscript with her late aunt, as she was dying of pancreatic cancer. Baldanzi teaches writing, comics, literature and theory at Goshen College, a small but mighty liberal arts college on the Indiana side of the Michiana region.