after Georgia O’Keeffe’s oil on canvas, 1943
To be like that, winged
in the canyon of where my body
will go when there’s nothing left
to be asked of it. Where I can say
bone without introducing the idea
of break. A sky so far from you,
your light has died before it reaches
me. I want to see hollow without
the blanching of before into after.
Where every question born
of what I never asked for
can become a moon to populate
the darkness & when your hipbone
bruises mine black, I don’t curse
my softness first.
Kirby Knowlton is from the South. Her work has appeared in Poetry, Rookie, and The Greensboro Review.