ISSUE 5
Suzanne O’Connell
Dragonfly Hatpin
“As I was saying...
don’t be alarmed,
I was merely leaning in to look at your hatpin.
It’s exquisite, the rubies in the eyes,
the diamond-laced wings.
It looks like it could fly off your hat.
A lovely hat too.
Let’s begin anywhere, shall we?
I’ll start.
I could eat your hat, it looks so delicious.
You and your hat are competing for most beautiful.
Your loveliness is too immense to capture in mere words.
But you know, none of us will make it to the end.
My advice is to sit on the wet sand
at sunset after a storm,
you know the kind where the rain blows sideways.
Pretend you are a seed at the edge of the woods.
You will notice the blackness of the sky.
Yet just above the horizon is a thin slice of blue
where you can imagine a coming brightness.
Start there.
Focus on that.
Then, fly.”
Suzanne O’Connell’s recently published work can be found in Cantos, Chaffin Journal, Drunk Monkeys, Doubly Mad, El Portal Literary Journal, Flights, Ignatian Literary Magazine, Medicine and Meaning, Midwest Quarterly, Open: Journal of Arts and Letters, The Opiate, Paterson Literary Review, Perceptions Magazine, Pine Hills Review, Pink Panther Magazine, Rue Scribe, San Diego Poetry Annual, Silver Birch Press, Sublunary Review, Tulsa Review, Visitant Lit, Word for/Word, and others.