Newton’s Dilemma

She flies into bed with me
and says, “Sorry, I must kill you tonight
but your dying will be like flying.”
She takes out a comb, “it’s okay,” I say,
“I part it on the left.” Tears run seams
in her face. “No,” she insists,
“feathers part in the middle.”
“Try to think like a butterfly,
symmetrically. After, I will
slip you in the thickest book,
flatten your dark edges.”
She switches open my razor,
singing the aria I wrote on birds,
and starts removing me hair by hair.
I forget the song of yellow
warblers, redstarts, only the black
grackles caw; the aria crescendos.
By dawn, she’s taken a lot out of me
but stops at my chest. “This is so hard,”
she cries, pecking at my heart.
“It weighs so much.” The aria
has only one sharp note; like
the awkward way magpies walk.
“I’m too tired,” she says, “I would stay
at this, but your fingers are so cold
and my stomach just growled.”
“It’s okay,” I say, “you’ve done so much,
I couldn’t ask more of you.”
She nods, wipes her eyes.
The aria’s left unfinished.
A murder of crows waits out of reach.
She leaves me the razor,
an apple on the pillow,
her light apology for leaving me
in the middle of such weight.
I don’t blame her for flying off,
after all, if I can make love
weigh so much, imagine
what I do to birds.

- m.r. kidd

Gravity - Rickie Lee Jones
Gravity - John Mayer
Gravity Rides Everything - Modest Mouse

October Onion

His life is in the dreaming vegetable;
Months of rain, sun, and moon.
In the dank cellar he cans his onions
and seals in the seasons.
Breathing gym-like air, he stews
flabby, pungent late tomatoes,
and suns the yellowed skins soft
to score and peel easy with a knife.

In the late afternoon
he picks the last October onion
remembering a faint kiss he once tasted
on a girl’s tear trailed cheek,
a kitchen window pierced by sunlight
falling on the necks
of canning jars,
and foil-wrapped potatoes baked
beneath a fire of fallen leaves.
He feels the face
braided in his skin, “It’s late,
past harvest for you,” he says
to the onion he drops in the dark
pocket of his red checkered jacket.
In the distance he watches
the blue and deep orange of sky trade places
and his concerns turn to the food,
the spice in stew, the table’s cloth,
the old familiar
taste of onion.

- m.r. kidd

Fields of Cotton - Danille Howle

When The Leaves Have Fallen - Willy Mason

Autumn Leaves - Pianafiddle

Time Of No Reply - Nick Drake