Positive Thinking by Elizabeth Onusko


 
 
Maybe the worst part is
already over
I’d braced for it
since childhood
in the process becoming
an authority on threatened extinctions
mine of course and the world’s
third smallest species of moth
if I were to climb up into
a forest canopy
pluck an ant from the leaves
and drop it
it would glide to a nearby branch
because gravity takes pity
on the diminutive
but the rest of us
have to learn
the safe way to fall
after the storm
trees came down
in the park near my house
I counted but lost track of
the trunks lying on their sides
their stillness had dignity
and I felt badly just leaving
them there
which is absurd
given all the lives
decaying wood sustains
 
 
 
Elizabeth Onusko is the author of Portrait of the Future with Trapdoor (Red Paint Hill, 2016). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Bennington Review, Best New Poets 2015, Conduit, Poetry Northwest, Sixth Finch, Fugue, and Southern Humanities Review, among others. She is the editor of Foundry and assistant editor of inter|rupture. Her website is elizabethonusko.com.