from Somewhere in Darkness, We Broke Even

from Somewhere in Darkness, We Broke Even

from Somewhere in Darkness, We Broke Even
 

we held hurricane season
                      scavenged

weather-torn amazons
                      beheaded palm
                      raving electrical wire

 
we were splints
                      for wings
tweezed barb
and hook
skin coarsened
alkali
gangrened nickels

     stench of salvage

we lived in open
     without season

we were endless mosquito heat
we were perches without fear
                      yet I
     skirt-swathed at knees,
                      eventide wading

a killdeer
dragging wing
in flooded citrus fields

                      a mother’s promise
                      made foolish game

Born to a Mexican mother and Jewish father, Rosebud Ben-Oni is a 2013 CantoMundo Fellow. A Leopold Schepp Scholar at New York University, she won the Seth Barkas Prize for Best Short Story and The Thomas Wolfe/Phi Beta Kappa Prize for Best Poetry Collection. She was a Rackham Merit Fellow at the University of Michigan where she earned her MFA in Poetry, and was a Horace Goldsmith Scholar at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. A graduate of the 2010 Women's Work Lab at New Perspectives Theater, her plays have been produced in New York City, Washington DC and Toronto. Her work appears in Arts & Letters, B O D Y, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review and Puerto del Sol. She writes the series "On 7 Train Love" for the blog of Sundog Lit. Nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize, her debut book of poems SOLECISM was published by Virtual Artists Collective in March 2013. Rosebud is a co-editor for HER KIND at VIDA: Women in Literary Arts. Find out more about her at www.7TrainLove.org