March 2024
Serena Maurer
serena.maurer@outlook.com
Bio Note: I am a co-conspirator in movement towards liberation for all and a longtime poet-in-hiding. I live on stolen Coast Salish land colonized as Seattle, WA. I love my friends, family, mountains, trees, and big open water.

Before

Before the memorial poems 
we read to your used to be friends 
gathered in that big open room,

Before they burned you, 
the smoke of you rising,
the fragments swept
and ground,

Before the calls from the nurse, 
your other daughter’s frantic texts
as she raced against 
your dying,

Before the grief ate your lungs, 
devouring them 
with a hunger old and deep,

Before this afternoon’s walk with the dog and not you,

We went for a walk 
with your scuffle and retractable poles
on that flat trail by the lake. 

The juvenile eagles calling 
as you waved and smiled.

Bird Body

I wake in the body
of a bird—
maybe a barn swallow
splayed on the pavement, not yet 
not breathing, receiving 
the rain

One wing tucked beneath
the tender arc of my bird throat

The hollowed bones of the other—
humerus, radius, ulna
with their crisscrossed trusses
stretched wide, winging
towards flight

Sternum gently rising,
the tip of the keel
on a skyward diagonal,
underbelly exposed to the world
like a capsized boat

Later, a kind neighbor
comes to clean me up
before I am torn apart.

Nighttime Visitors

They come in a sedan 
on a road that snakes
from my lower right eye
to my upper left
my sister at the wheel
my stepmother, in the backseat,
ballooning in and out
of herself,
as she did that last 
summer, saying
he left you this drink,
he couldn’t finish it 

my father is telling a story
this is how he did it
as he slides out the window
the car still moving
and begins to skate,
his right foot pressed flat 
against the hot cement
of the road,
his left foot pushing 
him over the edge
of my sight.
©2024 Serena Maurer
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