Morning in Midlife

After The Souls of the Mountain by Remedios Varo


You need to know you woke inside a mountain.
There’s a city of dirt-birds trembling under your collar,
in your hips. You have to get out of here
but the sky between your mountain
and the holy next is the smoke braid
of a grandmother’s hair. The sky outside knows

what your body said and you
do not. You need to know. You woke
inside a grief dress. There’s a hot moon
chafing at your ribcage. Beneath it the birds
wild with snow try to eat the traffic lights, try
to smother the small cars with their wings.

You could climb out into the ash with your grandmother’s arms.
You could ride her smoke into ghosts.
Tell the birds: the city’s been taken. Scrape your bones
out through the bitter rock.
Climb out of your name. Be a breaking–
a No. Knead yourself smoke-blue.

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Sally Rosen Kindred's third poetry collection is Where the Wolf (Diode Editions, 2021), winner of the Diode Book Prize and the Jacar Press Julie Suk Award. She is also the author of No Eden and Book of Asters, both from Mayapple Press, and three chapbooks. Her poems have appeared in The Alaska Quarterly Review, Shenandoah, Plume, Pleiades, and Kenyon Review Online.