Martha Catherine Brenckle
Phantom Limbs
When you burn your life down
to nothing
it takes a long time to rise
years of reaching out
With or without feathers, the sifting
through ashes, burnt bone, table legs
is difficult work: a shoe lace, a blue button, scraps of leaf colored silk
you don’t remember wearing
Memories you can’t recover, sing and itch like phantom limbs
you feel but cannot see
The eggs you crack for breakfast
held promise once
Home on Your Back
Every horizon is an invitation to start over
you remember this line as you make coffee
in the French press you unpacked earlier
you can’t remember who told you this
or if at the time it helped.
From the back porch, you look east
to the yet unopened sky
partially blocked with shrill green needles
huge pale gray clouds hover overhead
a hint of pale yellow showing through
you will see morning before light sparkles across the marsh
with its smells of sawgrass, earth, decay
not what your roots know.
Anxiously your toes curl
origins thin and pale under the balls of your feet
crimped inside your soul, not ready to dig down
to connect the familiar
with the unfamiliar
Behind you, boxes sit unopened
full of kitchen things wrapped in newspapers
furniture pushed into empty spaces
you will trip over chairs for weeks
until muscle memory takes over
and you make what you have carried here
home, another home
The only familiar sound is your breathing
orange brushes of words from other mornings
trapped in warm coffee, you hold
your youngest daughter balanced
on your hip, head buried in your neck and shoulder
her sticky sweet drool mixes with new smells
you try to imagine this is the place you live
your baby child oblivious of the world outside
her immediate view
encased in the husk of half sleep
her scent as known as your own
love me how big she mumbles into to your cheek.
A Cooper’s hawk flies over head, named for you
by the long sweep of its wings, the white tips of feathers
a predator you have seen before
you take refuge in its shadow
stretch your left arm wide like a bridge
girded between before and now
“This big,” you tell your daughter, “this big”
Martha Brenckle teaches writing and rhetoric at the University of Central Florida. Publishing both poetry and fiction, sha has published most recently in Driftwood, The Sea Journal, Broken Bridge Review, Lost Coast Review, and New Guard Literary Review among others. In October 2000, she won the Central Florida United Arts Award for poetry. Her first novel, Street Angel, published in 2006 was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award and a Triangle Award and was a Finalist for Fence Magazine’s Best GLBT Novel for 2006. Her short story, “Nesting Dolls” has been nominated for a 2019 Pushcart Prize.
