the animal grief makes of us 

for sarah mariah

on the train station floor, an earring. on the train
something someone somewhere will search for
until the tides take even their footprints: in upturned
loveseats & what forest remains after one careless
& well-placed flick of a cigarette. beyond the smoke
-stacks, grains. beyond the grains, ocean. beyond
the ocean, ocean, until the next land
lonely as Jonah the moment before he’s spat
onto sand. if this line was dawn, just now
dwindling—look, there it goes—& you were waiting
in the wings, beautiful puma, royal as an antler,
this is when you would saunter into the soft palm
of sunrise. have you found lately that you’re singing,
at first in the fringes of your black tumbleweed
head, where joy sometimes lives, little blooming
sprigs, then louder & flintier if i see daylight lick you
i’m smoke too? hey! it only hit you hugging the great
beech again to hear the slow drip of its heart?
tucked inside the hawk’s shadow in Washington
Square with only the winter sky left to call beloved?
it was so close we nearly called it what it was: real.
in your glasses’ reflection i was the already
vanishing thing. even longing has its limits.
a blue whale severed from her calves will stop
surfacing for air to spare herself
the inescapable summons of heartbreak.
my mother drew her last breath like the lost
chord two weeks after her sister drew her
last breath. i’ve prayed for nothing in Heaven
to hurt them. quiet now. i’m still praying.
it’s gauche i’m told to try to kill something
twice so when survive slipped into my pleas
i did. dusk circled your city like a wolf pack.
we wrote blackout poems in a snow white
Philadelphia while kitchens cracked
their choruses down sidestreets,
kerosene beneath boiling kettles, my dark
untellable from your dark. our fidelity
to the dead can make even anything
possible. consider our most mutinous
saints thumbing their noses at the afterlife,
slain & sealed in caves where they hear
our praise & broken bodies rise restored,
romance blushing in their psalms.
i’ve burned every note of Allegri’s Miserere
into my skin to make of me a song
that moves like the tree you tell
your secrets to. i’ve filled my lungs
with you & still i’m a blood-crazed mongrel
sniveling over bones frozen in mud.
whatever you do not have will find you
everywhere. trapped above us in the rafters
an owl thrashes about. on a haystack
the scraps we left remain untouched
by even a knot of hovering gnats.
we left the barn door open. our beast
belongs to the woods now.

Anthony Thomas Lombardi is a writer, educator, organizer and romantic in revolt. He is the author of murmurations (YesYes Books, 2025) and the founder and director of Word is Bond, a community-centered benefit reading series partnered with Brooklyn Poets that raises funds for transnational relief efforts and mutual aid organizations. He was a Poetry Project 2021-2022 Emerge-Surface-Be Fellow; has taught or continues to teach with Borough of Manhattan Community College, Paris College of Art, Brooklyn Poets, Florida State University, Polyphony Lit’s apprenticeship programming, and community programming throughout New York City; and currently serves as a poetry editor for Sundog Lit. His work has appeared in Best New Poets 2023, Guernica, Missouri Review, Black Warrior Review, Nashville Review, Narrative Magazine, and elsewhere. He hails from Brooklyn where he lives with his cat, Dilla.