This One Life, by Keli Osborn

sonnenizio on a line from Ada Limón

unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all.
I’ll bite the apple fallen, taste the open wound that seeps
into my mouth such sweetness. I will open my veins, spill
joy and sorrow until I am, finally, openhearted. Give me
the open ocean. I would run until my feet touch only water.
Deliver an opening in the forest, shaft of light, understory.
I have watched the swifts plunge into the open chimney
on Agate Street. The twitter, rush of wings, their propensity
for return—I want to reopen a hundred conversations, furious
noise of reconciliation, want to detonate an unopened portal.
No open book, I would be the damned library: humming, lit up.
I snip roses for jam jars, mouths open wide as the child’s lips
asking about a world older than unopenable doctrine. A bloom
of dissonance washed across her face. An opening, a claim. 

Note: “This One Life,” sonnenizio on a line from Ada Limón, borrows its first line from Ms. Limón’s poem, “Instructions on Not Giving Up,” in which it is the final line. Permission obtained. The poem was originally published online in Poem-a-Day, May 15, 2017, by the Academy of American Poets. The sonnenizio form was devised by Kim Addonizio.

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Keli Osborn writes and walks in western Oregon. She writes and revises poems to think and feel her way through stuff. In the suitcase of documents she inherited after her mother’s death, Keli found the first stanza of John Masefield’s “Sea-Fever,” written in her own second-grade scrawl. Thanks for the cursive writing practice, Mrs. Ames.

© 2025, Keli Osborn