Fossil as Slow-Motion Picture
Your shadow exits the capacity theater,
thorax and antennae pinned under
a sky bold and swallowless.
Spectrum of fish blood,
stillness in aperture,
pinch of complete sentences:
an ochre butterfly intuits wind machinery,
shed wings gracing the eyehole.
Matthew Schmidt’s poems have been published in Pleiades, The Seattle Review, Hawaii Pacific Review, and elsewhere. He is an associate poetry editor at Fairy Tale Review and the Co-Founding Editor of the Iowa-based literary editing and educational nonprofit 1-Week Critique.