by Kai Coggin
on my daybreak rounds,
swinging wildly in the breeze,
I spot a tiny acrobat,
white, thorny little wiggler,
possible stingers, a tutu of spikes,
dressed in morning light,
a caterpillar too small to even identify dancing in the wind like that,
her red head glinting in the sun rising, I wonder to myself, how —
how is this lilliputian creature
conducting her own aerial ballet,
and I, her only audience
marveling as she
bounces to birdsong,
writhes wildly, flipping and floating, bobbing in
the forest before my eyes, spinning with all of
her cares tossed to the trees, her ballerina body
bending in glorious arcs, how am I the only one
seeing this right now? am I imagining this?
am I dreaming? am I high?
on a typical morning
where I could’ve used a miracle,
watering the garden and thanking the flowers, suddenly she appeared,
gleaming like a Tinker-bell rendition in a community theater
children’s play of Peter Pan,
rappelling down from the rafters
or a tall mighty oak
or heaven
on an almost invisible silk line,
right to my line of sight,
plump little spiky angel in white,
whirling like a tiny dervish,
spinning the moment holy,
dancing, dancing in all her freedom —
bungee cord shot from her mouth in a liquid stream,
and as soon as it touched the air becoming fine silk,
spinneret miracle moving through her lips,
dancing from her own daring to drop from the sky,
oh, how I wish my words, spinning silk-pure
from the consciousness
of my heart,
would tumble out from my lips, touch the willing air,
and become something
someone else can hang onto, or a golden thread
I can hang onto myself
when I am
free
f
a
l
l
i
n
g
so I might
dance
in a daring ballet
of my own.
Kai Coggin (she/her) is the author of four poetry collections, most recently MINING FOR STARDUST (FlowerSong Press 2021) and INCANDESCENT (Sibling Rivalry Press 2019). She is a queer woman of color who thinks Black Lives Matter, a teaching artist in poetry with the Arkansas Arts Council, and the host of the longest running consecutive weekly open mic series in the country — Wednesday Night Poetry. Recently awarded the 2021 Governor’s Arts Award and named “Best Poet in Arkansas” by the Arkansas Times, her fierce and powerful poetry has been nominated four times for The Pushcart Prize, as well as Bettering American Poetry 2015, and Best of the Net 2016 and 2018. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in POETRY, Cultural Weekly, SOLSTICE, Bellevue Literary Review, TAB,
Entropy, SWWIM, Split This Rock, Sinister Wisdom, Lavender Review, Tupelo Press, West Trestle Review, and elsewhere. Coggin is Associate Editor at The Rise Up Review. She lives with her wife and their two adorable dogs in the valley of a small mountain in Hot Springs National Park, Arkansas.
