BY SARAH LEDBETTER

it's a church with the doors blown off it's

how pink hides inside pulsation it's the bowl

lying empty at night, it's the night.

it's the night

in its next shape not ready to be

looked at or spoken to directly.

it's tall as parents' legs when you were young it's

singing on the phone about earthworms

in a bathroom like lovers at a party.

lyrics volumes

archives scaffolds

recipes for breathing.

it's a slow courtship it's a change of address

followed by another and another

until no one but the dawn can find you.

it's naked and nameless as a songbird

the one that puts the sky up each morning and

won't

eat out of your hand and goes tweedlee eedlee eeee.

Sarah B. Ledbetter is a dancing writer and a writing dancer whose work for screen, stage, and page has been presented nationally and internationally. Recent publications include Floromancy, Poetry Superhighway, Right Hand Pointing, and R and R Literary Journal. She's currently at work on her first collection as well as a site-specific dance about female solitudes.

Process Note: On the morning I wrote this poem, my body had awoken and gone looking outside for the poem of dawn-meets-body. It gathered hints from the dawn air around my little guesthouse behind a larger one rented by drunken sorority girls. I sat down and harvested my experience with as little interference as possible like a tongue scraping, noting that these things were not the things but were evidence nonetheless.