Spooky Action at a Distance by Steven Ostrowski

Her dress. 

A first-degree murder of crows perched on skeleton limbs. 

One bird bows, and bows again, a supplicant. 

Two dive, become a silvery/black commotion in the stream. 

Her dress, wavy mulberry on thin-cloud white, smooth and attuned to her rainy breasts. 

This second-story window where I try so hard. 

This rainlight.

This thought, recurred: life weeps in an angel’s eye. 

This hesitance at the page, this muselessness. 

This uselessness? I never said that. If I should say it, you’ll know I’m not here. 

Her dress, a kind of soul in a closet, a decadence, and a oneness. 

This leather date book; its numbered days. These penciled crosses. 

The late-night journal entry, illegible but for God willing, she…

The scribbled bird-like images on the opposite page.

This forecast.

The plan to leave; the reason it can’t happen as planned. 

Out there, a caw. Far away but moving closer, another war.

Despite all, this trance that has me, holds me still as iron. 

And up in the universe, impossibly microscopic entities waving across planets and stars, everything all at once, whirring in a stillness that sucks itself in like astonished breath, birthing a first cause, then and now, and ever still. 

I want to call it love, even if I don’t understand a thing about it. 

These ghostly, long-fingered hands kneading questions into the soft matter of my brain.

Whatever the questions mean. However they turn out. 

Her dress on the floorboards, its folds accentuated by a thinning sliver of window-filled rainlight. 

One crow lifting from a limb. In her beak, everything strange that she’s ever gathered. 

Her, without the dress. Without me. The way everything without slips back to within.