3 Works by Anika Rossow Strasser

How to Leave A Room

Scraping your feet off the floor
and your bedraggled clothes and hair
slink behind you,

but then the door bursts open
with no foreshadowing
and a gust of freshly laundered air
picks you up
like you have spontaneously
grown a set of wings

and you fly away
with no further trace,
like dandelion seeds in the breeze.

 

Take/Don’t Take Notice

Pigeons scrounging around finding scraps from past lives, starlings flying,

gliding then turning mid-flight, shine of iridescent feathers

lit up by the sun, shifting their boundless,

unknowable airborne limits, then the ground, known as

the comfortable abyss, hard dirt pathways

christened by years of walking, why are dusty roads

not revered but overlooked, mind opens, everything is not

what you thought you knew well, the flowers are growing sideways,

the flowers are sideways, in the background the Nightingale

says leaning against the wall, “Don’t be shackled by a hypothetical

audience!”, reach out, ignore the obvious, drink the last cup

of coffee half-forgotten half-rotten with no care in the world

about its earthy bitter taste, then a breeze, then empty

trees, then a drifting murmuration of starlings lifts above.