Pieces
On the porch, Dinah has left me a rabbit –
or the cleaved haunch of one and its ring
of black intestines piled daintily on the mat.
A clever trick, though not as posed
as the neatly guillotined dove
its pert head hooped with feathers,
or the perfect rodent heart
picked from the body as a surgeon
would, dropped in the spine
of my split pages of Shakespeare.
There’s poetry in this – the small parts
that may one day may make up a whole
beast, strung together like a tiny Greek
monster, a dove-headed hippogriff
bounding in timothy, just another animal
to beckon me to or from dream.
~
Erin Elizabeth Smith is author of the books The Fear of Being Found (Three Candles Press 2008) and The Naming of Strays (Gold Wake Press 2011). Her poetry has previously appeared in 32 Poems, The Yalobusha Review, New Delta Review, Water~Stone Review, Third Coast, Crab Orchard, and Willow Springs among others. She holds a PhD in Creative Writing and is currently a lecturer in the English Department at the University of Tennessee.