Anne Yarbrough

A Crossing

Across the field
nine herons

unworked the air                       
close above me.

Close work, to
unravel a few threads
but not too many.

Enough to slip
through.

The sky shuddered
only once
at their touch.

My phantom
wings, unsutured,
pricked and stung.

Anne Yarbrough's first collection, Refinery (Broadkill River Press), received the 2021 Dogfish Head Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared in Poet Lore, CALYX, SWWIM, Spillway, THRUSH, Rust + Moth, and elsewhere. In 2024 her second collection was a finalist for Four Way Books' Levis Prize and for the Orison Prize; and a semifinalist at Sundress Press and Perugia Press. She lives along the lower Delaware River, which was once called Lenapewihittuck.