Today's poem is by AE Hines

Aubade
       

I'd like to make the argument love
is enough, that twelve bridges, heart
sutured by steel and wood lacing

the Columbia to the Willamette, could
always draw us back together. They say
the more we adore a thing, the more

names we give it: Sweetie, Babycakes.
Bridgetown. Stumptown. City
of Roses. In Jamison Square this evening,

a woman feeds a flurry of pigeons. Birds,
she tells me, her truest friends, as she hoists
a wet mash of corn over her head

like a torch thrust above a blue sea
of tents, raises it into cracks of a sky
pierced by concrete and glass, condominiums

now empty, turning their backs. A rush
of gray and purple feather blurs the air.
Two friends settle on her shoulders.

What the street woman knows: everything
with a body will compromise to eat,
must piss and shit wherever there's a place.

A chorus of cauldrons, rusted-out drums,
blaze up in the night, embers Flying out
into darkness like prayers

that quickly burn out. It isn't that I
didn't love you. PDX. Rip City.
I loved you, Portlandia,

like a drowning woman swallowed
by the river, a woman loved
by a man unable to swim.

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Copyright © 2024 AE Hines All rights reserved
from Adam in the Garden
Charlotte Lit Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission