NATASHA BREDLE
Box of My Naming
I had no premonitions about the day, other than
the woodpecker quill tied to my arrow, pleading softly,
notch me. But the kill could be found neither within
nor outside this fickle vessel. If anything, an absence
where my gut was telling me to shoot. Because in a bleak
patchwork quilt, I was the extinct coreopsis. Flowers
plowed over in the field. I had believed loss was not available
to me. Accepting that you are a fool is no easy feat.
So the stitching came undone. I have my needle. I have
the necessary level of tremble, the arched knuckles, filed nails,
down down down to a trickling creek. A thread is not
something hope can compare with. Photons of light
perceiving that more are on the way. I had never seen something
pulse so vehemently until red ambulance sirens led a war
down our driveway. The arrowhead decides to bite my cheek.
I wonder if I taste so similar to a clay bed beneath a stream.
And the quill: don’t waste me. It shudders like a breath. But I am
only as strong and as fragile as a body. There is the flesh, there is
the bone, there is that subtle pucker of the clover, four-winged,
believing it holds the weight of the world. Come again, over and over.
The name Pandora needed updating. Here I lost the key. I found
the birds. The arrow blooms like a fortress and I aim.
Natasha Bredle is a young writer based in Ohio. Her work has been featured in publications such as Trouvaille Review, Words and Whispers, and The Madrigal, and has received accolades from the Bennington College Young Writers Awards as well the Adroit Prizes. In addition to poetry and short fiction, she has a passion for longer works and is currently drafting a young adult novel.