Anything Small
by Kai-Lilly Karpman
I regret loving anything small.
A sweet bird watches us
through a crack in the blinds.
The wild unnerves me. My distance
from it, how the facts of survival remain
utterly neutral. The bird holds a worm
in her beak, I celebrate and mourn.
Loving the small ensures you’ll never be happy.
Everything crushes what it can. Facts,
Men remind me, are not intended
to be cruel. Couldn't I learn to love
those cold, metal artifacts?
Winter’s grip still offers golden light,
out of place, yet crushingly beautiful.
The morning errands, pick up the mail.
Desire returns to say: open your wrist,
become the wide, wide vision free of fact.
I wish someone would change all of that.
A sweet bird watches us
through a crack in the blinds.
The wild unnerves me. My distance
from it, how the facts of survival remain
utterly neutral. The bird holds a worm
in her beak, I celebrate and mourn.
Loving the small ensures you’ll never be happy.
Everything crushes what it can. Facts,
Men remind me, are not intended
to be cruel. Couldn't I learn to love
those cold, metal artifacts?
Winter’s grip still offers golden light,
out of place, yet crushingly beautiful.
The morning errands, pick up the mail.
Desire returns to say: open your wrist,
become the wide, wide vision free of fact.
I wish someone would change all of that.
Kai-Lilly Karpman has been previously published in Plume, Image Magazine, Passengers, and elsewhere. She received her MFA from Columbia University and studied at Iowa University’s writer workshop. She is the recipient of the Columbia University 2022 teaching fellowship, the Columbia University Word for Word travel and research grant, the winner of the John Curtis Memorial Prize in Poetry, and the recipient of the Barbara Sicherman Prize in English scholarship. Her lyrics have appeared in Mz. Marvel and The Marvels soundtracks.