Leftover Miracles My mouth is narrow. I cannot open it wide enough to feast on all that a day offers. Example: today the sky is a sinkhole writing in watercolor which the crows are circling (those slicked, stern critics) there are eleven new roses swathed around sticks like tufts of pink cotton almost too sweet and a man stops to tug a bit on his daughters jacket and answer why for the seventh time he nearly misses the shuffling bus on which everyone notices each other and pretends not to on which two women will tell him, what a sweet child, and he will glance at another man’s newspaper surreptitiously. Onion skins waft their way into everything a promise of tomorrow’s bounty, and the handprints climbing up the walls like a prayer. And one mother holds a sick child close to her breast, incarnate Madonna of the one resting in the corner. Anything could be ahead - tiny fingers iridescent with suds wild mornings that suddenly grow still the steel blade of hope knifing its way through a kind of despair it is too much to chew; I am gulping the world down whole I am managing only the crumbs the leftover miracles piled into baskets (nothing is wasted after all, keep the big meals for the ones with larger stomachs) I am watching the world break open and multiply before my very eyes.
Jenna K Funkhouser is a poet and author living in Portland, Oregon, always trying to cross through the membrane of the sacred surrounding us. Her poetry has recently been published by Geez Magazine, the Saint Katherine Review, Ekphrastic Review, and As It Ought To Be, among others.
Amethyst Review 
1 Comment