I think you should know he was thirty-three,
and not my first. I think you should know the sky today
is both bruise and blunt instrument.
A body may be a self-replicating ministry.
I was sixteen. William Blake had visions of angels
as young as nine. I call this wound a gift, I pay it forward.
He, I, my parents, visited a museum. He bought my mother
a Girl With a Pearl Earring coaster set. Sometimes silence
is consent’s scaffolding or the surface tension permitting
a heavy word to float. Blake’s childhood home
was built over an ancient graveyard. A body may inherit
a biography of ruin. I want you to know he was a decent man.
And me, I suppose. I was decent once too.
Snow also accumulates. You can tell how deep it is
by how far your boot sinks down.
I’ve never made a snow angel but I’ve watched
kids do it. Arms whipping back and forth
like something winged awash in a glass.
Lara Egger is the author of How to Love Everyone and Almost Get Away with It which won the 2020 Juniper Prize for Poetry (University of Massachusetts Press, 2021). Her poems have appeared, or will soon appear, in Verse Daily, West Branch, New Ohio Review, Ninth Letter, DIAGRAM, Washington Square Review and elsewhere. She is a recipient of a Massachusetts Cultural Council fellowship and winner of the Arts & Letters Rumi prize. Born and raised in Australia, Egger now lives in Boston where she co-owns a Spanish tapas bar. She holds an MFA from the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers.