☀ Today's Poem: From "Reconstructions" Bradley Trumpfheller

I won’t explain. My aunts spell
                                                         around the vanity mirror
& centerpiece me, my lips plummed,
                                                             my neck belled mid-flight.

   After the food’s uncooked, the heirloom paring knife
stitched up the bell peppers & dark meat,
       after the fiddle leaves
   left their fiddles, the porch undressed of wasps & us
our old names—
    right here. As if even the evening
    didn’t let on. No parking lot, no gas stations. A scythe
of emptied prisons shudder
       alongside the highway; bougainvillea
& gun oil in the sheets. All my cousins slow-dancing
in their cowboy boots & antlers.

    My mothers singing to the dogwood tree
    blooming black across my arm.

Your hand finally on the small of my back, without any kind of fear.

This time, I’ll be a girl & you can be anything
alive. Take the rope off your wrists.
       Somewhere far away from here,
    a star’s unspooling its star-white curtain.

     What happens if we begin already angels?
Press your ears to my wingspan. Hum a little.

We are the most possible kind of daughterhood.
        I promise.

Step into the light.
   Let me see the mark our rapture left behind.