K.R. Copeland is a Chicago poet/digital photographer. Her work has
appeared most recently in Stirring, The Muse Apprentice Guild, Lily, Swivel,
Opium and Saucy Vox. K.R. is also one of two judges for the ongoing
Beginnings Magazine poetry competitions. Her first chapbook, "Anatomically
Correct", is currently available through Dancing Girl Press.

1) Because Tony Drove Himself off a Cliff

Sadness swells like the lungs
of a neophyte skydiver.
Still, I don't care

to compare apples and oranges or
something more radical -- figs.
These things happen, leaves leave trees.

I dig my guts like pulp, reveal a seed, analogy;
as cranial is to brain, my love for him is hate
or something greater

than a melon dropped from sixteen stories up.

2) Blood Birds

The sky, mind clouded with doubt, fearful of night,
of the morning, without warning slits its wrists, spills red
on heaven's wall to wall white carpet.
Several cardinals fall toward ground, feathers

twisted in sophisticated knots, in fits of ruffles.
Everything is subtle now and then.
Like when I tried to take my life, the knife too dull
to cut the custard of my dermis.

I switched to poison mixed with pills, the will
to die, t's crossed i's dotted, in my mind.
Instead of dying, young and sad, I had a headache-
full of bird feet, whiskey, seasons
and a pail too packed with puke to fit regret.

4) Sensory Loss

I guess I should have felt something when I fell out of love;
a lump in the gut, a chokehold of throat, instead I barely noticed.
Like losing lashes one by one, the subtlety enormous.

Boredom played a major role, let's call it Marlon Brando.
A streetcar speeding unseen by desire --
and me, so Blanche Dubois, in dim light's parlor.

My heart of hard rock greened with moss,
up-tossed toward the next scene;
no crack in my patella, zero needles in my spleen.

5) Strings

She's unattached, but for her shadow, low
and latched to land.
No daddy's girl, imperfect pearl,

no phantom hands to hold her down --
to stroke or poke around well-rounded boundaries.
She is proud out loud to no one.

She is not a nun, nor knees-pinned sinner,
a spinster someday maybe with stray cats
and rats about the cellar of her brainstem.

She'll remember them, the men most worth forgetting,
father, God, and plod her way through toxic-
cock-licked sorrow. Soaked in now,

she models her skin for the dirty old sun
in a swimsuit that's unfit for swimming in;
six flimsy strings.