by Dylan Hogan

No one ever thinks he’ll find his love

dead in a rain gutter on 23rd Ave S.

But there’s her body, doll-like, stiff.

To think that she was just in flight,

to think that once they gathered

bottle tabs together and made

a jeweled array of things that might

as well have been shining. Dear crow,

who never once forgot a face, what

is it like to remember everything

you ever lost? Her wings which gleam

the way the sunbeams glance off

mica in the concrete, a light so small

it dare not be a miracle. I confess

I too have lost some things I didn’t

want to lose. When my dad’s dad died

he did not know my name. Vanished too

are all of my great loves. The companion

to a hundred gloves. Receipts I meant

to save, my childhood notebooks,

coins to pay the meter, lighters and

the things they lit, cigarette butts,

a necklace made of keys my mother

made for me. I cannot list them all.

Dear friend, I am not like you. I’m afraid

I don’t remember. Return to this, your still

beloved. The way her feathers are as always

shining. See the gutter now. How blessed

it must be to hold her there, believing

though she cannot know the folly,

that somehow, somewhere, she is flying.

Dylan Hogan (he/him) is a transgender writer who serves as associate editor of samfiftyfour_literary. He earned his Master of Fine Arts from the University of Washington Bothell. Originally from Maryland, he currently lives in Louisville, Kentucky, with an 8-pound dog named Dot.