The Carbon Dioxide (of Poetry)

by Jennifer Wagner

---

when all the shapes of dreams

flew by outside your window

 

 

and you couldn’t catch one

to call your own,

 

when every

gnarly, blighted

 

branch of life’s undoing

rotted right up through your soles,

 

those pieces of poems called out,

laying dormant in blades of nevermind grass,

 

for you to crawl

across the grit of unholy floors,

 

to find grace through

time-smudged glass

 

and see them

beneath the soil, coiled

 

and waiting for you

to breathe them into birth

---

This poem came in first place in the dVerse Poets Pub second anniversary contest.