This is your reminder call

Go back and photograph the rabbit,
disarticulated, stretched on the margin
scruff of dead grass and brown pine needles
obscure fur stretched over withered limbs, the head
two crucial inches away.
                                    Aren’t you the one
once gifted a black wing by a girl who found it
on the beach? Remember cleaning out trellised
years of morning glory, finding within
the oldest vines the fragile skeleton
a bird, still gripping a vine
in desiccated talons.
                                    I’m calling to remind you
where clinging gets you. I’m calling to tell you
to take the wing offered.
                                    Second chances seldom rise
from graves of regret. You can’t see it
where you are.
                                    But I hover over you
like a red-winged herald.
Every trumpet of my golden horn
warning and invitation.


Merie Kirby is the author of the chapbooks The Dog Runs On and The Thumbelina Poems. Her poems have appeared in FERAL, Mom Egg Review, Orange Blossom Review, Rogue Agent, and others. More: meriekirby.com