Ellery Akers: Four Prose Poems

Market Street 

Everyone has had at least one shock. Each of us is a struck bell that still reverberates. Walk down the street, and everyone who passes you is echoing inside. Even their smile has that chime in it. 

The Dead

They can only watch as we thrash through our lives. To them, we must look like elk blundering into the undergrowth. My sister, who slammed doors in the years of her hot, packed life, has turned into moonlight. All she can do now is shine.

On the Trail after the Wildfire: Writing about Being Afraid

Today, writing about the fire––remembering scrubbing the walls with vinegar to get rid of the smoke smell–-I watch a tortoiseshell butterfly unfurl her proboscis across my page. I suspect she thinks it’s a spring flower–-maybe a wild radish or a woodland star. Her tongue sweeps back and forth across my words. 

Lizard: in the Canyon

One afternoon, I was so angry, I was shouting at my dead father. When I looked down, a lizard was basking in the sun on a rock, swiveling her head, looking calmly up at me with lidless eyes. 

Copyright 2024 Ellery Akers

Ellery Akers’s books include Practicing the Truth (Autumn House, 2015 and 2021) and A Door into the Wild, which won the 2024 Blue Light Press Book Award. Her previous poetry collection, Swerve: Environmentalism, Feminism and Resistance, won BookAuthority’s Award for the Best Environmentalism Book of All Time.