Thereafter

My heart in a bucket
in the barn black with ice
and warm lambs lantern-lit
to tease it apart with greedy tongues.
The world revolves
taking with it wolves and pipers
green hills stacked like pears
and me, departing your expanse
in a glass-bottomed boat
doomed to precariousness
my eyes weighed with candlesticks
too white to light.

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Shannon Cuthbert is a writer and artist living in Brooklyn. Her poems have appeared in Collidescope, Bluepepper, and Chronogram, among others, and are forthcoming in Muddy River Poetry Review and Glass: A Journal of Poetry.