by Jocelyn Sears
I’ll leave the lions
to you, the elephants with their tusks white
and chiseled as pieces of soap. Let me
be a swallow.
The tender armor
of feathers. A safety in smallness.
Air in my hollow bones like a second,
stronger skeleton.
And the dark
music box of my throat. My beak as a needle
sewing me to the underside of the sky.
I choose
to belong to myself.
I’m tired of being a child’s plaything—
backyard bird hung by the neck
on a piece of string.
Jocelyn Sears is a California native currently living in Charlottesville, Virginia, where she was a Poe/Faulkner Fellow with the MFA program at the University of Virginia. Her poetry has recently appeared or is forthcoming in PANK, CutBank, Bellingham Review, DIAGRAM, and The Collagist.
Hawaii Pacific Review 