When my eyes eat yellowed photos of you
I drink
midnight in sepia ink from yellowed prints
where your name waves in letters cursived in time,
curving past present to the digital screen
still
holding your face in pixels and light
in the cold of my old winter bed.
I claw
through the hard to the touch of time when bird bones
pile at your feet, feathers hang from your teeth,
your tongue on my cheek, wet with woodland
and wren.
I curl
in dreams of your fur, until at dawn I bury my love
in the graveyard of wildcats
I loved but could not tame.
Mary Alice Dixon, author of Snakeberry Mamas: Words from the Wild (Charlotte Lit Press, 2025) is a co-editor of Kakalak Journal of Poetry & Art. She is a multiple Pushcart nominee and has been a finalist for the NC Poetry Society Poet Laureate Award. Her work appears in Main Street Rag, storySouth, Swing, and elsewhere. Her poetry rises from grief mixed with the conjure magic songs she learned as child from her granny, a blind Appalachian seamstress. Mary Alice lives in Charlotte, NC, where she leads hospice bereavement writing workshops and grows sunflowers in cow manure. Find her at www.maryalicedixon.com.
