ELIZABETH SAVAGE ON

Nancy Takacs
The Voices
​
My bee and blossom voice
hums in my wrist each morning, flies out
over the field, bumbles through dust
in the April wind, flies low to the apple trees
to lose myself whole in each center.
  
Each morning when I was ten, a voice
spoke in my right leg as it swung
the kickstand up, I became the gold words
of motion, circling in the cement yard,
then breaking away to the earth of the park
where hundreds of geese lifted together.
 
That bicycle voice
is a wise voice, tells me
to keep moving, get back on
and churn my thin beige tires
after my left eyebrow splits open,
switch gears on the handlebar, feel
for the easy uphill clicks in first,
always coast downhill in second, 
still try to reach all the green lights in time. 
 
During the night there is the other voice,
the one that doubts its weightless
bodies and tree of wings.
 
But the bicycle voice says the roads
are familiar, and the bee-blossom voice
says it will spill its spring language
if I begin:
Open.
Go in, go in.

Elizabeth Savage is the poetry editor for Kestrel: A Journal of Literature & Art. She will publish two new chapbooks in 2022: Noncallable Debenture from Dancing Girl Press & Here, a Portico from Trainwreck Press.