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Clone Song





Falling across curious laps
who won’t collapse our weight

into foldable furniture    
are blackened embouchures

or umbrellas that retract
I feel today didactic about my own legs

and how they carry me at a pace
I set.  A barrette keeps unbridled

emotions away from the face
and I walk away from my face

so as to bring justice to or at least
a record of my body’s misgivings

about contortion back into the mainstream
Would that there were a clone to fly

like the crows over my itching little
life and buy me something small

to eat and on repeat I go falling out of the sky
and into the bed of a driveway and

go to sleep. It is awkward not having
enough force to keep up with the running

creek. I am no babbling brook, more so
a rook with two bows on its wings.

Where is my clone to provide a better life
for the children that follow me, call me

father. I have never given life to a plant
longer than a couple weeks. It is not so simple

to love something. It is not a punishment
to let the life around you go like a paintbrush

off a table. When I am able to walk among
a crowd then I will have my downy feathers

then I will know how to say precious words
to another. Don’t bother me now with all your

underwater signals. It is as though I am learning
again for the first time how to look at an eye.





Ellen Boyette received her MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was a recipient of the Alberta Kelly Fellowship as well as a Teaching-Writing Fellowship. Her first manuscript of poetry, BEDIEVAL, was a finalist for the 2019 Slope Editions Book Prize, judged by Solmaz Sharif. Her work appears or is forthcoming from jubilat, The Columbia Review,  Denver Quarterly, Ninth Letter, Prelude, Bennington Review, New Delta Review, poets.org, Tagvverk,  and elsewhere.