The little sparrow living inside your chest

won’t stop flapping its wings and trying

to fly. The sky desires your music.

Your treble clef and your staff.

Why are you still trying to live

in a house you have set on fire?

Is it because the x-ray showed you

something that was both beautiful

and terrible? Is it because every time

you are about to fall asleep

your body lurches as if falling?

Now I am speaking to you

from a tremendous height and a great

distance. Now I drive by a cemetery

twice a day. The volcano opens its mouth,

sticks out it’s tongue and all the villagers

say ahhh! Now ashes accumulate,

clouding the landscapes features

like love sometimes clouds good judgment.

Nothing exists until you name it.

How much longer are you going

to practice making the perfect fist?

Patrick Meeds lives in Syracuse, NY and studies writing at the Syracuse YMCA’s Downtown Writer’s Center. He has been previously published in Stone Canoe literary journal, the New Ohio Review, Tupelo Quarterly, the Atticus Review, Whiskey Island, Guernica, The Pinch, and Nine Mile Review among others.