The day you died, I kept looking for you
in every natural thing. The begonia
on your now-empty porch; the fat bees
hovering in the air between the church
and your apartment—maybe right at the height
you fell from. Could this be you—broken
into individual hovering pieces?
Outside my office window: a doe
pulling, with ravenous hunger (it seemed),
at low-hanging leaves, drizzled in spring rain.
Elizabeth, I thought, is that you?
I kept expecting your ghost to tap my shoulder,
the chimes to clink their metallic tinkle
when there was no wind, the blue jay to call to me
a coded message. But there was nothing.
Natalie Homer's recent poetry has been published in The Cincinnati Review, The Boiler, Berkeley Poetry Review, Meridian, Barnstorm, The Carolina Quarterly, and others. She received an MFA from West Virginia University and lives in southwestern Pennsylvania. Her first collection, Under the Broom Tree, is forthcoming from Autumn House Press.