The Gift

I recline on the outside of my bones.
Like a feather, light brushes
this soft pulp of being.
I sing.

Through my voice, a man is walking.
Earth and stone fall backward for his step.
My voice swells,
a beautiful tingling passes through me.

The man arrives at his building.
Pigeons fly from the stooped,
flat roof. The man pauses at the door
to check his suit.

Lonely, I sing
into the blundering arch
of the dappled pigeon's flight.
The world, as I know it,

arrives in the swooping
countercurrent
of chord and flock.
Here is a new man, in overalls,

with cumbersome midsection,
throwing crumbs
from scraped hands. Wind falls
through my brown, dilated lungs.

The sky is overcast.
I sing an old Laotian woman,
gray hair curled tightly to her skull,
turtle-like neck leaning forward.

I am lonely. I sing
the slow proliferation of rain.
Fruits and vegetables carted
from the littered sidewalks.

Emergence of snails.
Black octaves of umbrellas.
And still, I sing the next
musculature, the next red arrow.

Grasshoppers are leaping by the stream.
Children stare
from an improvised shelter of cardboard.
I sing the next one walking

along the furrows of my spine.
Like folded wings,
I offer layers and names. I sing
the next one walking, and the next.

Atlanta resident Ellen Lindquist was a winner in the following contests: E2K’s Net Author Flash Fiction Contest (2003); Fiction Inferno’s Very Short Fiction Contest (2002); Lotus Bloom Journal’s Anniversary Contest (2004); the DeKalb Art Council’s Fiction Contest (1998). She was a semifinalist in Mid-American Review’s Fineline Competition (2001) and a finalist in the Shy Librarian Fiction Contest (2002). Her prose poem “The Erstwhile Wire-Woman” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize by Purdue Calumet’s Skylark magazine. In 2004, she was invited to submit poetic texts to the London Art Biennial.