When I was a child I understood
Adam and Eve’s fall quite
literally, saw them floating
together in silence through a pure
blue sky, their hair fluttering
away from their faces, limbs tumbling
through
and through
and through
the air. I did not think of the thud
their bodies would have made,
the ground shaking, their bruised
and shattered bones –
just endless
descent
like the kind of snow
that comes down all day
until the pale of the sky blurs
into the horizon.
When my cousin fell
from an apple tree and died
on New Year’s Day
when we were both ten
years old, I refused
to believe in death,
spent the day of his funeral
watching the snowflakes
falling
and falling,
shrouding the windfall fruit
like grace.
Saved
KateLynn Hibbard’s books are Sleeping Upside Down, Sweet Weight, and Simples, winner of the 2018 Howling Bird Press Poetry Prize. Some journals where her poems have appeared include Barrow Street, Ars Medica, Nimrod, and Prairie Schooner. Editor of When We Become Weavers: Queer Female Poets on the Midwest Experience, she sings with One Voice Mixed Chorus, teaches at Minneapolis College and lives with many pets and her spouse Jan in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Please see katelynnhibbard.com for more information.