don't try
we cannot bury it / the cardinal
dead early / the fraught char
wingtips / the active slip
rocking / grey indigo
dog / little dog / knee high
to nettle stand / kind as darts
the tantrum / the entire moon / exercise a mouth
betraying gladness / tongue jangling
to smell the mud / which smells like mud
breaking / which also smells
like charred coal / the way the one who runs
survives winter / passing a joke
down / warm life – young
thing / delivered / a world
clenched
Lisa Marie Brimmer is an interdisciplinary artist and facilitator living on Dakota and Anishinaabe Ojibwe land in so-called Minneapolis, MN. They are co-editor of Queer Voices: Poetry, Prose, and Pride. Their work has been published in Tennessee and Ishmael Reed's Konch Magazine, On the Commons Magazine, The Public Art Review, Open Rivers Journal, The Alliance of Adoption Studies and Culture' Journal, and multiple anthologies. Their work is forthcoming in A Garden Of Black Joy: Global Poetry From The Edges Of Liberation And Living (Feb. 2020). They are co-curator of Queer Voices Reading series along with Sherrie Fernandez-Williams and adjunct English Faculty at Century College in White Bear Lake.