Migrations
Joseph Fasano
And now that you have nothing left
but nothing,
walk out
through the rubble of your country
and look up
through the gnarled heart
of the garden,
the moon of youth
like burnt nests
in your branches,
the farthest stars
like antlers
in the snow.
Listen to them,
the dark flocks
in their drifting.
And that one thing
you must have known
in the beginning,
when you lay down
in the burning of your first world,
with your own hands
that had hurt you
into burning,
and you felt it, then,
that strange song
moving through you,
luminous and ruinous
and moving,
and you knew
that it was no one’s, wholly
no one’s,
and you knew
that wherever it was going,
it would cast you out to where you had to go.
Joseph Fasano is a poet, novelist, and songwriter. His novels include The Swallows of Lunetto (forthcoming from Maudlin House, 2022) and The Dark Heart of Every Wild Thing (Platypus Press, 2020), which was named one of the "20 Best Small Press Books of 2020." His books of poetry include The Crossing (2018), Vincent (2015), Inheritance (2014), and Fugue for Other Hands (2013). His honors include The Cider Press Review Book Award, the Rattle Poetry Prize,, inclusion in the Forward Book of Poetry, and a nomination for the Poets' Prize, "awarded annually for the best book of verse published by a living American poet two years prior to the award year." His writing has been translated into Russian, Ukrainian, Lithuanian, Spanish, Chinese, Swedish, and other languages. He serves on the Editorial Board of Alice James Books and as the Founder and Curator of the Poem for You Series. He is currently writing a "living poem" for his son and posting it on Twitter at @stars_poem.