Image first published in Mother Jones, appears here courtesy of Victor Juhasz

the sun is not stitched in with rays,
because words are a tongue
and have their own mysterious sex,
because I rarely allow another
to make me come, because unlike a willow
tree, I don’t understand how
to give in, how to let the breeze be
the only one with control, because
if I could give in and trust
I’d want to trust the redbud tree
that snapped in the windstorm, its branches
stretched out, the way its leaves have stayed
green for days without any connection
to its roots, until my soul shifts
into the coup in Honduras, some other School
of Americas tragedy, I’d want to trust
a little girl that’s there now, jumping rope
and singing without knowing what a coup is
or why the shouting sounds so angry until
my soul shifts into the woodpecker
beating his beak against bark,
the sound of it, something round,
a hole to hide out until I can find the world.

Nicole Robinson is the Program and Outreach Coordinator for the Wick Poetry Center at Kent State University. She is the author of the chapbook The Slop of Giving In, The Melt of Letting Go. She received her MFA in poetry from Ashland University, and currently lives in Kent, Ohio with her partner, Deb, and their greyhound, Bill.

Read our interview with Nicole here.