For Anna
As the crow’s caw rings silence across birch bowed low
with ice and snow, we echo a carrion’s emptiness.
Restless fingers pick imagined lint off black dresses
that are iron-pressed like crisp winter. Our polished shoes blur,
the ice we weep shattering around our half-thawed feet. We echo
emptiness, the walls, windows, barren trees outside flat, as if pressed
with an iron. Our polished shoes melt into the carpet, and we feel
like palimpsests, peeling bark atop pulp atop bone.
The walls around us are flat, as if even the funeral home
is a work of origami, crushed between two palms. We’ve become
palimpsests, plastered smiles atop grief, rewritten for this paper place
where our mom lies so still, her absence humming.
Our backs bow like folded origami, crushed between two palms.
Our paper fingers pick black feathers from dress sleeves, eyes avoiding
the stillness of her folded wings. Her absence hums across wept ice,
as if the ringing silence that follows the crow’s last caw.
Printed in Qua, Fall 2022 issue (print)
Sara Solberg 
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