coins of the year by Lindsey Warren

     Dan Zen CC



coins of the year

chrysoprase
sky, my hand drops
all its leaves, light
crumbles into grass
and pieces, each face equals
its shadow in a season
dug up, in a season with
my mother on it, someone
fixes a box of baby teeth and
somewhere behind the now-blue
sky the moon waits to continue
its story all over the
bathroom sink, I’d give any
finger to hear it
though it is obvious
that Babel has been over
for so long, in a bedroom
with a window the color
of my life a girl relays
to her dying grandmother how
she counts the coins
of the year, which metals
are which
twilights, in which piggy
bank winter stashes
pennies, how expensive January’s
lights are but Orpheus
interrupts in his slippers
he made cry, wind
spreads dark and is lost
in dark, You must go
where I cannot, though he
still doesn’t realize I
have never left
the underworld, instead
I left my childhood
room, now painted empty
and playground and when                                             
I turn down that street I
hear nothing, voice
hiding in a depth
not mine, I am
but not the night closed
over the trash can
lid, what slipped there
is still falling under a few
stars, falling down
through all the words
for remorse

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Lindsey Warren is a recent graduate of Cornell University’s MFA program.  She has been published in The Fox Chase Review, Broadkill Review, Icarus Down, Rubbertop Review, Marathon Review, GASHER Journal, Josephine Quarterly and Hobart.  Lindsey is the recipient of a Delaware Division of the Arts Fellowship and has been a finalist for the Delaware Literary Connection Prize and the Joy Harjo Prize.  She splits her time between Ithaca, New York and Newark, Delaware.