The Wardrobe's Best Dressed: Prime Meridian by Connie Post

This selection, chosen by Guest Curator Sally Rosen Kindred, is from Prime Meridian by Connie Post, released by Glass Lyre Press in 2020.

Raven in Flight

The sky has never forgiven you
for your blackness

when you fly
inside the backdrop of night
I am the only one who sees you

you claw your way
into my dreams
but I cannot
find you in the morning

your beak weighs heavy
on the ruined dusk
I hear your guttural call
when I am running
down to the dry river bed

I remember the same way
you flew over me
when I was running away
in second grade

how you knew my mother
would find me
how you have
pulled away at the skin
of my regret

years have passed and still
you land at random
on the uneven fence
of silence

always helping me
to understand
what it means to
live as the heretic

to realize
there is no contrition
in the fading light

Connie Post served as the first Poet Laureate of Livermore, California . Her work has appeared in Calyx, River Styx, Slipstream, The American Journal of Poetry, Spoon River Poetry Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review and Verse Daily. Her awards include the Liakoura Award, and the Crab Creek Review Poetry Award. Her first full length book Floodwater won the Lyrebird Award. Her second full length collection (also by Glass Lyre Press), Prime Meridian, was released in January 2020 and was a finalist in the Best book Awards and International Book Awards.

Sally Rosen Kindred‘s third poetry book is Where the Wolf (Diode Editions, 2021). She is also the author of Book of Asters and No Eden, as well as three chapbooks, including Says the Forest to the Girl (Porkbelly Press, 2018). Her poems have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Los Angeles Review, Shenandoah, and Kenyon Review Online. She teaches online workshops for The Poetry Barn.