spade-winged, escape-driven, skidding the wind,
a shadow struggling to slip its ties,
and one behind my shoulder vanishing
in wooden clicks down the onion-skin creek,
then two or three above repelled apart
with one shooting the bank, bent on its meat—
and I’d remember to be home by dark.
Tonight, they're still falling out of cloud dents.
This older, unripe sky backlights their feints,
kite falls, flipbook dusk games—stunt moments
when memory is the closest thing to play
and I am that tin-edged boy scraping home
through dust light to our bite of yellow window.
Max Schleicher works as a copywriter. His poems have appeared in Mid-American Review, Prelude, and other journals. He can be found at @maxschl giving unwanted commentary about baseball, poetry, and the upper Midwest.
