Return to the Beginning
By Poetry Issue 85
The scrambled eggs, already fried and fragrant on a plate, slip back into their shells; each smooth white egg sails toward its vagrant mother chicken, roosts in a fertile cell. The melody beats back to eighth notes which settle, dark spots on the snowy staff of bass and treble clefs, then briefly float through Bach’s…
Read MoreIn the Beginning Was the Word
By Poetry Issue 85
It was your hunch, this world. On the heyday of creation, you called, Okay, go! and a ball of white hot gasses spun its lonely way for a million years, all spill and dangerous fall until it settled into orbit. And a tough neighborhood, it was, too. Irate Mars, and sexually explicit Venus, the kerfluff…
Read MoreFire in Freedom
By Poetry Issue 85
All action, it leaps, faster than the eye can follow, from treetip to trestle tower, from cedar roof to harvested fields, cartwheels and spins, leaps again and attacks, slithering up dead oaks and dry junipers, captures, holds close, strangles, suffocates all mouth in its consumption, gulping and swallowing entire acres of sere and withered stalks,…
Read MoreIsland as the End of the World
By Poetry Issue 81
When did my life become the past? When did our new world, the new creation, the fulfillment of everything, become patience? We worship patience now. This island effaces with endurance, our lives that grow into longsuffering. A smile to notice how an island’s stony perimeter is much like the end of the world. How the…
Read MoreThe Fruit Thereof
By Poetry Issue 83
Hold the phone, it wasn’t an apple, apples have seeds and seed-bearers, check, perfectly fine in vegan Eden, nor does the story name the fruit, botanical paradox, fruit without seed, which even those grapes, supposedly seedless, have at some stage, albeit vestigial, and if the tree delighted her eyes, then Stevens was wrong, beauty in…
Read MoreEx Nihilo, Then Us
By Poetry Issue 83
From nothing God made everything, they said. Nothing plus God is nothing we said. But with something to work with, look what we’ve done. God said, you’d better and you’d better not, they said. And sometimes it looks like you have when you shouldn’t. Eyewash, we said, it’s just how we are, honeyed self-interest in…
Read MoreThe Holy Fool Meets Himself on One of His Highways
By Poetry Issue 83
Down the long road leading me back to me I saw my holy friends. I called hello. This is not allegory. Mind me well. I do not speak in tongues or prophecy. I talk in the plain speech of poetry, which is to say, the morning gives me stars, leftover nights from which to fabricate…
Read MorePsalm Ghazal I & II
By Poetry Issue 83
Psalm Ghazal I Touch the cheek of a child and God comes in through the fingers. Open your mouth, and the devil comes in or the devil goes out. Flatter with your tongue the wine and then the hollow inside my hip. At the request of your lips, my mourning turns to dancing. Only…
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