TINY DEVASTATIONS by Alyssa Yankwitt

The hour rises
and there are things I don’t understand

for instance, why you
are always saving me in dreams

carrying my limbs
through circus tents

gently placing each fallen extremity
into a plastic, cracked blue bucket.

You say      it’s ok love,
                  I’m protecting them

                  in case they don’t grow back again
                  I will sew them onto your body.

And I believe you

know this is the truth
because like each dream before

you promise me      love, I will teach you to fly
and do

only after confessing
                  we are both casualties of the same war.

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Alyssa Yankwitt received an MFA from The City College of New York, where she teaches in the English department. She is a Staff Developer for Poetry Outreach, an organization bringing poetry into NYC schools. Most recently, her poems have appeared in Up the Staircase Quarterly, The Lake, Sein und Werden, Cloud City Press, Stone Highway Review, and are forthcoming in Houston & Nomadic Voices. Alyssa has incurable wanderlust, enjoys drinking whiskey, hates writing about herself in third person, and loves a good disaster.