Scrap Bones: Poems

Collier Brown's Scrap Bones reads like a post-pandemic epilogue to T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land." No angels or flying horses here, just panic disorders, email fatigue, and the spiritual dead end of a 23-and-Me test kit. And yet, resilient are the muses in this collection--the bees, the starlings, the dragonflies--skimming over the wastes.

The Sabine Series in Literature ... from "Orion, Break"
they're sleeping in their homes,
they're waking from their beds,
they're at their desks
and on a call. They're unimpressed.
That's not your fault.
Nor your concern. I'm tired
of images, of lines and dots and codes.
When I step into the dark,
I only want the novas
and the nowheres in between,
and if I'm very lucky--
if I've beaten all the odds--
just one, naïve fluoresce
of the insect who
is its own hello/goodbye.