Migrations

by Charlotte McConaghy

A sky is a sky is a sky, and yet here, somehow, it’s more. It’s bigger.

I miss you. That’s what I know best.

“There is pleasure in the pathless woods. There is rapture on the lonely shore. There is society where none intrudes, by the deep sea, and music in its roar.”

It’s not life I’m tired of, with its astonishing ocean currents and layers of ice and all the delicate feathers that make up a wing. It’s myself.

When I die don’t bury me in the ground. Scatter me to the wind.

I write it all down for him, so that when he reads the words he will be filled with the courage of the birds just as the wind fills their feathers.

Only a great fool, my mother once told me, does not fear the sea.

Lynch walks past the row of computers with

oldest sixteen, each with the same unruly