animus
a poem
Photo by Marcos Paulo Prado on Unsplash
fission me and
this disowned half would show you:
salmon glide downstream
.
that every river yields
at one easy bend
go slow
.
wade knee-deep and
mid-thigh in, each splaying
fingers to the current
.
letting the slick of secret shame
slip from our palms
surrender pupils to the sun
.
surrender my bare skin
tick every wild hour off
with my indigo pen
.
with your midas tongue
every fish and stone and inch of me
golden
.
I swear to God
.
to burn in the crucible of you
to feast on each second
as I cleave myself in two
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Comments (14)
Congratulations on your top story.
Thanks to Top Story I read my first piece by you; incredulous first impression. I subscribed.
Nice job!
Gorgeous piece, Morgana. Nice to see your brilliant self around these parts. Congrats on the TS.
Congratulations 🎉. Keep up the fantastic work.
Gorgeous imagery and emotion 💝
Back to say boom, told you so, congrats on Top Story!
Wow! Stunning! Great use of imagery! And such an emotional build
Great to see you here! Love this... it has the mental texture of one of those squeezy stress balls. Do you know what I mean? So satisfying, you can't help but throttle it as its eyes pop! (No idea if that in anyway translates. Ha ha!)
Love this. So spare in language and yet so astonishingly full of emotion and action. Fantastic work. Thank you for posting it.
The under currents of power and grace in this poem are so striking that instead of analyzing I read it again and again in the hope that the emotional chords that it struck within me might unlock its underlying meaning. But instead, I saw the violence and beauty you evoked, the explosive fissioning, molten metal in the crucible, salmon slowly wending their way to their birth place and the golden sheen and willing sacrifice of the love expressed in your words. I know from past interactions how precisely you select your words. And yet the poem flows as if expressed in the moment without artifice or forced and stuttering expression. Its passion and longing are both deeply felt and timeless. Absolutely loved it, Morgana!
This has a great free verse feel to it.
Saw you around commenting...dammmmmmmn Morgana, missed your wordsmithery. This is all kinds of intimate and evocative. Well bloody done!
Nice poem that was!