My head is underground
having its gray crystal day
knowing where a dark
is left on for all
the seeking. I can only stay
behind some holiness
and think of all those whose
forgiving hands I feel,
my ears close to the mycorrhizae
loving time. Even I came down here
looking for the kiss I wanted
and instead found the crying
stone that smelled me in its sleep,
I wanted to be known.
You who have suffered, I dig
my bones for you: scrawled
on calcium language a hard-
ness so gentle it eats rain
night after night so you don’t
have to. You have my blessing.
Just bring a firefly beauty to my
face sometime so I know
you were thinking of me.
– Lindsey Warren…
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I can’t begin to guess about how many years
it’s been since I’ve thought about my parents:
how my father swung his belt for small infractions.
I felt the leather but didn’t see myself as heroic—
I was a little boy, not Ornytus in The Aeneid,
but sometimes I couldn’t remember my name
the next day. I was a traveler on a treacherous journey,
a kid in a continuous crime scene, an angry victim.
Two damaged strangers owned the slowest part of my entire
life, and I think about something, something else I’ve told
myself: I wonder whether I’d have shined brighter if lovely
people had raised me in another family, earlier in the century,
if my sophisticated mother would have played vinyl Coltrane,
telling me, When you listen to him, your heart shatters. …
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We’ll never make it
to the end. Forget
James Bond and
Star Wars and
anything trying
to be forever. Scry
the stars to find
the finite. Indeed,
we could count
each one and one
day be complete,
ready for the next
distraction—the next
forever, smashed
into fathomable bits.
Keep my watch
in a drawer next
to the latest big
bang—their schemes
a cyclic reminder…
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when you burned down my house
i tried to rebuild: monuments of soot
trampled beliefs trying to pull meaning
from the inside of a cedar tree
and i carved. i carved you, next to
a motherless god, a wifeless god,
a god that poured fires over still
waters and begged to be left alone
behind a curtain, gold rods and gold seams
fraying at the end like the veins
that tied me to you, kept us sprouting
branches instead of scorched forest,
the center of the earth crumbling into
itself a dead leaf;
a home turned skeleton.
– Alyssa Hanna…
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To speak of the living like limestone,
as if they were brittle.
Alone and full, I gaze up.
Anything in the sky
– always –
a convex void repelling me back.
Silent, I watched his ankles
dangle from the pier, swollen and blotched ––
the skin a discolored canvas
stretched over puff and bone.
And my throat closing. How to speak of his
illness without admitting decay?
We didn’t. His face towards us ––
now –– a soft presence
through the leaves.
– Bevil Townsend…
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A
fledgling fell from the steep
elm branches last night, never learning
to fly. We crept over dew, thinking it asleep,
and learned the truth.
Hallmark strangeness
of childhood, finding things can die.
Like learning our parents had names,
it tumbled us out of ourselves
into an expanding world
where the metallic twist of pennies
on tongues echoed
in blood.
Life released slowly to us, unfolding
its creases—a map of courtesies
letting us stay small and close.
But it rushed
when we lifted feathers
limp and cold, light,
and folded death in a box
atop a broken nest.
If life came all at once,
we could never learn to breathe,
to speak. Never learn bird and flight and tree,
fall or death or broken,
never blink
or become ourselves.…
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We all start in water ‒ endure its fullness,
bellies hoarding each molecule,
the swell of its ocean yelling
to our bones.
So when her tide breaks,
she’s hauled from
the house with the knowledge
she’s rupturing.
I brim mid-stride
on the uneven pavement, split our blood
for the first time. She watches me
glisten across tarmac,
takes her fulsome weight from the kerb
to the taxi, hopes to replenish
us both with a sack full of saline,
knows
she’s not the right one
to receive the cuckoo-baby nestling
in the thud of her pelvic bones.
– Abegail Morley…
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