☀ Today's Poem: "Lark" Corey Marks

A stone lodged in the boy's throat.
Why had he even taken it in his mouth?
Hard to remember now—something

about its smell, like rain. Something
about the open field, a distant song,
a sense of the day's never-endingness.

On a lark, his mother would say.
He'd moved the stone inside his cheek,
along his teeth, pressed it against

the roof of his mouth like candy,
though it tasted of dirt and ozone.
It was hard to imagine being on a lark—

such a small thing. The size of his fist,
though finer boned. In the story his mother
read when she used to read to him,

birds were caught in branches painted
with glue. The birds would settle
aud then exhaust themselves battering

against the air that wouldn't open
to them anymore. He imagined
plastic bags snapping in wind.

And now he felt like a tree filled
with larks, his whole body branched
with panic, lashing and lashing.

Meadowlarks lived in the field, he'd
seen them skitter in low arcs away.
Not true larks at all, though

it was hard to think of them as a kind
of blackbird with their yellow chests
and brown-stippled backs.

Still, that's what his book said
when it mattered to him once.
Who named these things? How

did they mistake so much?
He didn't like his own name—
something an old man would be called.

His parents were old. The day
felt old. His mouth tasted
like the ringing inside a bell.

And how little he filled his name
the only one he'd ever own—
it strained away from him. Beyond,

names drifted the field, billowing,
unattached, catching briefly on shocks
of broken grass, a raised lip of stone.