Free Verse
Here is a History
Of greys Once and future forgotten Forever furs And dura mater Once from the sea Grey: A parrot who loved me Grey: Juvenile whales wash on western shores With no wakes There is not enough ice algae to feed Grey: Wolves recovered, now hunted by fed decree migrated and mitigated echolalia ricochets through white hollow bone-- cochlear swirls in the churning gyre-- species unprotected by time In time future Greys land and repopulate the flat dust; they’ll emerge from hissing hatches of opaline discs that have hot-hurtled through space-time waffle-iron grided witnessing kinder galaxies wielding psychic staffs, tendrilled and glowing: Bring us back To us
By Kate Kastelberg about a month ago in Poets
Lacuna
And ______ came down from the hill dust to the ankle, with a burr caught in the hem. The fishermen left their nets. In the water were Simon, Elias, Mara, and a fourth name dissolved beyond reasonable recovery. Seven houses in a row beside the salt road. A woman laboring in the first, bees behind the walls of another, a blue door belonging to ______. But by evening there were only six. An old woman asked where he had gone and pressed one finger to her mouth. The copyist drew a black circle beside this passage, about the size of a fig. Later copies sometimes show a well. At Capernaum, ______ entered the temple. Lamp smoke, goat hair, aging figs collapsing in their bowl. He whispered something to the flame. What happened next tore a brown scorch through four whole pages. The blind man saw ______ and he wept. A woman sick twelve long years rose before sunrise and walked backward into the sea. She returned carrying an egg. When it cracked, her husband found another shell inside, soft and blue as the vein in a wrist. A tooth rattled at its center. A word commonly translated as miracle in accounts of wounds, doorways and errors made during construction. And ______ said, Blessed are the ______ for theirs is [worm damage] He who wakes with dirt beneath his tongue shall [illegible] Keep your lamps [illegible] The white animal beneath the house must never be [page ends] At supper, thirteen places had been set for twelve men. Bread, olives, and wine. Among the dishes, several tiny bones which nobody mentions eating. One chair stood away from the table. Peter counted the company, and then he reached for the chairs. A note in the margin reads, Peter, leave it. At midnight, ______ entered the garden, and the Greek becomes difficult from there on. A noun used nowhere else in the surviving text. An early translator tried orchard , scraped it away, then wrote, ... where absence waits for its body Someone later attacked those words with a sharp blade. One cut passes through the parchment and removes part of Judas from the other side. After this, rope, iron, vinegar, a sandal lost on the road, three women whose names have migrated into the margins, a hill outside the city, and ______ fixed there. Above him, the sign survives only as, KING OF THE Seventeen more lines follow obediently. Empty. The tomb was opened before sunrise. Linen neatly folded once. Two coins near the wall, and a dead moth caught in the cloth. Mary found something damp on the stone, and she touched it. For years afterward her bread always tasted faintly of rain. The manuscript ends inside a word. Much later, someone attempted to draw a face beneath the final line in faded purple ink. What remains — two shallow marks for the eyes, the beginning of an ear, and where the mouth should be, a hole worn through to the next page.
By Shannon Hilsonabout a month ago in Poets
Spring Fever
Somewhere between starvation And capillary action, There is a time where trees Become themselves: Pure child sensation In their self-mirrors, Bursting thought prisons High in view of geologic tidal storms, floodplain swamp levelings, Spelunking crystal cave collapses. No longer the thought word of T-R-E-E But A blissed union Of the platonic and the ideal That blooms Reticular Petechial pinpoints From cheek-ridge To scalp line. The belly, diaphragm and pelvis Hollowed like a young gourd Content with being empty But hung above with lights to view Firm skin turned to shriveling Amongst so much watching jubilee Below A pregnant pause at the time Of oxygen starvation— Reduced to the Pleistocene, Reduced to the compass-less Swimming. Reduced to the salt. A line must be drawn in the sand. Scooped out, The fear of the Meeting sets. They are never to meet: The deities of spring and fall, The budding watching the dying, The dying watching the budding And advising. The spells must be followed To a “T.” Draw a circle of salt around The Meeting. The worlds must be kept separate. But a fated messenger, A Doomed Bridger Has seen a Gap In the Tapestry and thinks to fill the chink With a different color Of thread A ne’er before-seen color That can’t communicate Through cathodes and diodes, Or cationic and anionic Dances— No, the Doomed Bridger seeks To draw out the map, To plot out the graph, To be the improbable remainder, Moving between Tangent and Sign.
By Kate Kastelberg about a month ago in Poets
The Saint of Missing Things
Saint ______, whose face was forgotten while the paint was still wet. I see that a key hangs from your left hand, even though its lock disappeared before Lent. In your right, one milk tooth, a hotel Bible swollen with rain, three minutes from October 1989, and the blue cup my mother broke before I was born. In fact, they say you hold onto everything in a place without directions. You recall the cough erased from the recording, the fourth stair from a demolished house, a dog's last dream. The other name considered for me but swallowed whole before I was baptised. Saint ______, I have misplaced an entire afternoon. It was warm, and someone was frying onions downstairs, while television murmured through the wall. Please return the small red chair from the room on ______ Street. Return the mole from the shoulder of ______. Bring back Tuesday, and bring back the six inches of air between my grandmother's hand and the telephone when it rang that night. You may keep the telephone. Saint ______, patron of dropped stitches, extinct smells, misheard instructions, unborn sisters, and the soft machinery that carries a person out of a room after everyone else has gone home. Last night I put bread on the sill as the old women instructed. By morning, five small bites had appeared along the crust, but the marks belonged to a mouth I couldn't picture. I ate it anyway. Please forgive me. There are so few sacraments left that still taste like anything. Saint ______, if you find the hour appointed for my death, please lose it again. If you find the god who lived behind the wallpaper and sang me lullabies when I was six, ask whether ______ remembers me. If you find my original face, bury it under the kitchen tiles in the eastern corner. And if somewhere in that impossible inventory you come across me? The whole one, the first one, the one who existed before my name learned to turn its head. Please put me back exactly where you found me.
By Shannon Hilsonabout a month ago in Poets
