Todd Osborne

Saturday

On the morning my sister survives
a hurricane, I sleep so late the day
is over before I’ve woken up. The blinds

low in my bedroom mean it could be anytime
at all. The new bedsheets don’t fit
the pillowtop, but I make do, consider

buying new sheets but don’t—I’m however old
and still trying to figure out how to be a person.
I know my sister is okay because she doesn’t

call, my mom doesn’t text me frantically.
I am as alone as a person can be these days,
a goose who thinks they’re flying by themselves

then looks around and sees a perfectly arrayed V.
Maybe we are always trailing the people we love
in our wake. Or following theirs. The meteorologists

stay quiet about Mississippi, but I know: heat,
humidity, a chance of rain every day. I walk
around the room, make coffee, say the only prayers

I can say these days: thank you and thank you
to whatever lives inside empty places,
thank you to whatever I cannot name

that keeps sending their presence outward,
the point the geese follow because they know
it’s where they’re headed next.

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Todd Osborne is a poet and educator from Nashville, TN. His works have previously appeared at Tar River Poetry, CutBank, The Missouri Review, Redactions, Nat Brut and elsewhere. He is a poetry reader for Memorious and a feedback editor for Tinderbox Poetry Journal. He currently lives and writes in Hattiesburg, MS, with his wife and their two cats.