Canary in a coal mine
Never            
learned to speak
Never            
learned to fly
Gilded plumage tarnished by the soot of your surroundings
Don’t breathe they said, less dust settle in the trachea
Cadenza cut by choking
Treble tinged with poisoned honey
Don’t fly, they pleaded, lest you plummet into the abyss
Don’t play rough, lest the coals deface each fractal
Crystalline
Commodity
Taxidermy tucked away under plexiglass
Away from light
Away from green
Wings clipped for buyer’s viewing
So you    
learned to croak
A battle cry
Learned to crawl
You drank the moonlight with saucer eyes
Learned to dream
Dust to ashes ashes to dust
Mottled feathers bloom into red and gold
Phoenix rising
Canary in a coal mine learned to be infinity

Fruit Salad

“I love you” is a lullaby
Lull me to sleep with the butterfly thrum of
steel on steel on wood on mango flesh
My tongue salivates for
Peach pits and persimmons
Trickling with                       sweet summer sap;
Elixir for the gods
“I love you” was never the song of goldfinches
Instead I grow up listening
To the rough-hewn symphony of
Callused hands chopping fruit salad
clementine and banana slices
In the Soviet Union, bananas were a luxury,
So you charted a course
Flew red white and blue polyester half-mast
to a land paved with gold and candy
Crying out “I love you,” when the hull struck Brighton shore
Pomegranate seed
lodged in your throat a caged bird singing
Semi-Russian semi-English semi-Yiddish
Hymn for a country that barely blinked at your embrace
But your song is enough for me