Pat Hanahoe-Dosch

How My Light Is Spent

Something looks back from the trees.
Something cries in a voice
like bones scratching together:
hip joint grinding into femur.
Sycamores and black oaks
grab tendrils of wind in their knobby branches,
empty beneath winter’s poverty.

Something runs away,
a dark speck on the periphery.
The sun is almost all gold
and red in the sparks collected
in ice dripping from tips of branches,
from curled strips of sycamore bark.
The landscape is all dead.
The landscape is all alive.
The forest’s breath becomes snow,
flakes of bone settling like ash
on mulch and twigs.

Something looks back at the fallow field
I stand in, caught
between houses, behind,
and what remains
of a forest.

Something breathes and calls and runs away
while I can only stand and wait.

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Pat Hanahoe-Dosch earned an MFA from the University of Arizona. Her poems have been published in The Paterson Literary Review, Rattle, The Atticus Review, Panoplyzine, Confrontation, Conjunctions, Rust + Moth, American Literary Review, Apple Valley Review, The Red River Review, San Pedro River Review, Apt among many others. Her books of poems, The Wrack Line and Fleeing Back, can be found on Amazon.com or the FutureCycle Press website. Check out her website at http://pathanahoedosch.blogspot.com/ and Twitter @PHanahoeDosch.