Colfax Avenue
And walking to the edge of the roof,
trying to feel less at home.
Good intentions, though;
good intentions, good
intentions: a birch limb
holding one starling.
On days like this, whenever
it is—now, maybe?—I start
to suspect I am either
made of rising water
or the burnt edges of a Wednesday,
tasting only some of it,
the glass afterthought in the center.
Outside the fence line
of a Frank Lloyd Wright house
I find a worn out dime
from 1947 and realize that
someone, somewhere
is carving their own name into their own arm
as if it’s tired of itself; that
somewhere, a weather system
is tempted to take a life,
a cold front to be a foot upon a throat—
I don’t know if I’m allowed
to think of it any other way,
so I try not to.
Now, sitting,
at what seems more
like a kitchen table than before,
you ask if I’ve ever mistaken you for a finch or a dove.
To answer your question: yes,
but I can’t remember which one it was.
ADAM SCHELLE is a student of English at Indiana University South Bend, focusing in creative writing, and will be pursuing a MFA in poetry in the fall of 2018. His work explores subjects ranging from love and relationship to war, domestic mundanity, Midwest imagination, and existentialism; pushing the boundaries of language and imagery in order to deconstruct and rebuild perceptions of, and emotional responses to, words on a page. His most recent work has appeared in Analecta, as well as other academic journals.
