Instructions on Flying

Crouch low on knees and palm.
Look into mud puddles when
hunting for sky.
Teach heart the way to drift
nimble and carefree: a waif
or small river. Here’s a sprinkle
of the good devil, a ruin to set
your spine straight. Write letters that
are kind and wistful. Dear one.
I haven’t lost. These nights do you sense
a certain release out there.
The woods’ muscular moans: fury
of the unfallen.
The father and baby coyotes whimpering,
scent of me in boiling august.
Wear daisies in your hair
and let them wilt. Rummage in
garbage cans with incidental gods.
Bake your mother’s banana nut muffins.
Invite coyotes back to your
apartment for an orgy. Be on top.
Laugh. Write poems with images
that devour the one of his kissing
the small of your back. Make ferocious
love to all that howls and drowns
in your blood. On the way collect
fallen things: berries, abandoned
twigs. Stay small and agile.
Leave footprints nowhere.
When dawn rushes insistent like
your elegy strip for coyotes and
let them seduce you into the dark
neck of woods. Tonight your heart is
still hungry, will eat anyone.
Let her eat someone. Dance in dive bars
and graveyards, embrace the passing and
the past. Attend Sunday mass with
a blackbird’s nest for a hat.
Conquer wilder things but ignore the
strangled hummingbird barely trashing her
left wing against your chest. You who left
I forgive. You who never came, forgive. That
heart does not care what you desire. Blindfolded
carnival dragon, each carnal mouth anxious.
Trick heart to light. Still, go slow.
To make of heart a balloon that
will never burst. To open
so hard it does.

-Sonia Mukherji