Bobby Parrott

Before We Were Small Enough

Even with ten thousand
channels of clear moonlight,
a revolution reaches
the pharmacy of a tulip. 

A seam.

In the story's erasure at death,
my house spills galaxies
the way a casket pacifies me
into the same space
as love. Born of wood,

before we were small enough
to turn on the stars,
the weave of a new mother's

forgiveness. We lay
awake in our grave, gauge
the distance in suns,
fishtail and slide in this race
to be loved, this brace

of doves released from earth
as killing flowers, violets
bent to render us, to keep us,
to remember us from birth.

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Bobby Parrott was probably placed on this planet in error. Originally from Baltimore, Maryland, this poet's universe frequently reverses polarity, slipping his meta-cortex into the unknowable dimensions between breakfast and adulthood. In his own words, "The intentions of trees are a form of loneliness we climb like a ladder." Poet, musician, photographer, and teacher, he currently finds himself immersed in a forest-spun jacket of toy dirigibles in ascension, dreaming himself out of formlessness in the chartreuse meditation capsule called Fort Collins, Colorado, where he lives with his house plant Zebrina and his wind-up robot Nordstrom.