Barbara Berg
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Mystery Solved
Anonymous, a woman
absorbs sound through her throat:
the sound of notes digging,
then pounding above ground,
vibrations growing, by ring after ring,
slowly exploding.
Sometimes she is sanctioned;
sometimes she’s not.
Her bone is borrowed or not borrowed.
Which it is
depends
on if
the word for see means
to see, not to understand.
Anonymous, a woman
carries nutrients from the depths,
feeds them
back to the surface. She carries the grief she loves
until
she is stranded.
When she is stranded, there are songs:
she swallows them full.
For many days
and for many nights, she is in
her belly,
in nutrients traveling through air.
She is swallowed by
an anonymous sea
where she is a mammal and a monster
hunting for meat
and eating small organisms.
Anonymous, a woman
carves fish from yellow cedar,
commanding them
to leap
out of the water.
She sees the light and the dark
of the sanded wood –
the stain
misshapen and soft around the edges.
And here is the truth
as one finally knows it:
She spells her name
in the cedar
before the command.
All letters point to
understand.
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Barbara Berg is a poet in Los Angeles who uses speech recognition software. She has published poems in In Posse Review and Lunch Ticket. She won 1st prize in Fiction at Northern Virginia Community College for a short story many moons ago. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University Los Angeles in 2010.