Erin Elizabeth Smith

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.