The first seconds of sunrise brush gold
across endless rows of almond trees.
Grain silos burn white against dark fields
like the candles last night in the church.
I daydream, watching a murmuration
of birds turn overhead like a restless sleeper,
my own bones longing to wake
into a shape that spacious: a net large enough
to catch the whole sky. Signs
on the roadside keep saying soft shoulder
like a kind of instruction. To shed armor,
our tender selves underneath, naked
and shy: a new husband contemplating
his husband in the early light. To lift
our bodies into the air, drifting together
and apart like that cloud of starlings,
edges impossible to sketch—
one sinuous flight, a thousand different wings.
–
Phillip Watts Brown received his MFA in poetry from Oregon State University. His poems have appeared in several journals, including Ninth Letter, The Common, Ruminate, Spillway, Tahoma Literary Review, and others. He lives with his husband in northern Utah and works as a graphic designer.