Negative Space
The
wild honeysuckle bullied its way
into
every square foot south of my driveway.
I’m
unwieldy with the pruning saw, but as branch
after
branch falls away, I anticipate flourishing
in
the negative space,
now
open for the butterflies and robins,
and
hollowed high enough to stand full under
the
canopy of fragrant leaves.
I
wrangle the teeth of the saw
against
the neck of a branch grown wayward,
while
listening to a
podcast
suggest that
solitude
and loneliness
are
more like distant cousins
than
identical twins.
Or
maybe, sometimes,
loneliness
is solitude,
atrophied.
Well
muscled, it takes me
to
the dark room,
and
after drowning me
in
a wash of burning
restlessness,
it waits
for
my shadow self
to
slowly imprint
my
drying, developing
counterpart
in
relief.
Andrea Lee
Dunn is from
Indianapolis by way of the Texas-Mexico border and North Carolina. She studied
creative writing at Texas Tech University and now enjoys trying to balance a
writing life with raising three children. In addition to poems previously
published by Flying Island, examples of her work can be found in New
Mexico Review, Southwestern American Literature, Cagibi Journal,
Entropy Magazine, and the Same.