To the One Who Tames
By Poetry Issue 92
Tu deviens responsable pour toujours de ce que tu as apprivoisé. —Antoine de Saint-Exupéry Tame me—you whom I can never see— ——-each word I utter, each prayer I kneel for. Here I am, pacing—now wrest from me ——-a new song to find its way to you. If you…
Read MoreMy Life as an Open-Air Temple
By Poetry Issue 92
From cramped to roofless ——-I became—I don’t know how— ————–an open-air temple with no pillars. My walls of stone, lichen-covered, where many feet came to pray. ——-The willows shook around me ————–as mice and small insects knelt in moonlight, I could feel the breath of many spirits ——-winging through my chamber: ————–rabbis dropping pocket lint—…
Read MoreCreate in Me a Clean Heart O God
By Poetry Issue 92
The thing I did for sorrow was silence. The thing I did for sorrow, the thing I did, the silence. I thought when replacing the pillow under the sleeping girl’s head it’s been a while since kindness. When my mother was sick I didn’t go I rolled over in my own bed I thought she…
Read MoreCrewelwork
By Poetry Issue 92
With more persistent stitchery I might breach the red intelligence of berries taking French-knot shapes among embroidered leaves, or bring a spirit hovering in the satin-stitch of a hummingbird’s small throat; while outlining a dragonfly I may divine its mythic origin in dragon—fiery, winged, then tricked into an insect’s form, but keeping flashes of the…
Read MoreExodus
By Poetry Issue 92
It takes a lifetime’s blindness to see one’s father. —Cid Corman My father mumbled forth his violated commandments for half my life. I inscribed them on incense and holy water and when I drank them they tasted like cigarette ashes in a coca-cola can. There were no tablets save the pills he didn’t take.…
Read MoreFat Tuesday
By Poetry Issue 92
Out of exceeding gloom and out of God, I break a prayer from a growl and sing a hymn more ordinary than tap water. I pray that I might be more than my skin, this dance of atoms, this ritual of ash, this tribe of twilight and rattled angels, this pattern of epiphanies rejected. I…
Read MoreMary, Mother
By Poetry Issue 92
It is a fact that no one worries in the Bible. —Adam Phillips i. She worried. & she knew. Good enough makes a faint halo. Still she was good enough. She let the infant dream his unbroken body at her nipple. She suckled him & waited as lightning struck. Often. His eyes clouded— ultramarine, gray…
Read MoreDomestic
By Poetry Issue 92
The knife was held like night— quiet in her husband’s hand. In silence, the umbilicus was snipped. The moon went on shining. A mare leapt astride a stallion. Jerusalem was drowning. A match dropped. Hay fired. Kings slunk away. The world hung heavy on her breast. —Love’s foundling. A curtain twitched: unholy neighbors. A nosey…
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