the ragged bone
presses beneath damask skin
and a seam gasps
for the body
to become
a city of spires:
rib-cage and wrist
and ripped fabric
© 2019 Stellular Scribe
Tag: free verse
death is a mother at a hearth
she imagined death as a mother at a hearth
fava beans and fennel
oregano and almond-ground pasta
set to simmer in the three-legged pot
the steam lifted her
kissed her
savory firelight bathed her
a peppered voice anointed her
she imagined death as a mother at a hearth
and such sweet regard ruined her
© 2019 Stellular Scribe
Hereafter
He holds the arms of the fever,
the wrath of the water,
and their bodies are enlarged with dreams.
They are the bodies of crushed marble,
gold, amber bone extraction,
the raw materials behind the Hereafter,
when the Nile remained in the luster of Lebanon.
A gem of her old light
softens the tongue of its severity.
And he, the only poet in the night sky
kisses her collapsed face
to taste tomorrow binding.
© 2019 Stellular Scribe
Vine and Sand
he shed a line of crystalline notes
each incandescent half-step
more unexpected than the last
a high, winding vine
creeping from an unseen branch
tendrils tendering my neck
taking root within my chest
his melody sweeps into a golden desert
of glass sand and endless thirst
and hot wind slipping in and out of me
I spin on burning soles
to avoid his lashes
I claw at the constricting song
to breathe again
© 2018 Stellular Scribe
Your Body Brought the Sea
Your body brought the sea to my bed,
cloaking me as the rushed arch of a wave,
a tide suspended,
unable to break.
Grabbing onto you is like running
my fingers through the wet of a storm.
Despite the salt and surf,
you are not cold —
quivering with mammalian heat against my chest,
holding with arms of fever
and hurricane infection.
I swim for hours.
I never drown.
© 2018 Stellular Scribe
Godself
I summoned my godself last night.
She was of adventitious frame,
gilded in hippocampi,
the sororal All of
Hermetic name.
Inside, rolled upon herself — she and I were intertwined.
Bedfellows, in one body.
She said, “Remember that time?”
I knew myself awake in her.
She pressed our hand into the sheet to prove a
thought we never had. “It’s real, now,”
she concealed. “Can your archangels do that?”
© 2017 Stellular Scribe
Headlines
I was thinking about touching the light
that touched the sidewalk
that touched the squinting faces
of Abrahamic patriarchs, light
that now fell upon half-lidded
undergraduates in a caffeinated daze
on a mazy day in the simplest place
in the world, an altar in a valley
in a library.
I was thinking about how far away
I was from the headlines yet
the hearsay was here, only I wasn’t there —
not with the “dozens of snakes dumped in
an Arkansas Walmart parking lot,”
not where they decreed that
“saturated fat was not the devil,”
not when “the world’s last male
northern white rhino joined Tinder
to find a mate.”
I was thinking about how in leaving
this sanctum of damaged denim and
unwoven eye contact I would be forced
up into the light, into the beam that
encapsulated the paradisiacal serpent
and Esau in his gluttonous rage
and The Rhinoceros of Versailles
as he paced his marble menagerie.
I was thinking,
but the light made
hazy prophets
of the newsworthy,
and here I was walking
in low LED, looking down
upon the ticker line.
© 2017 Stellular Scribe
Cage-Free II
plucked from down of
giantess, marked by
viral fingerprint
as an unintended
nucleus of crumpled avian stock,
soon set to Styrofoam
sitting among a dozen
sound, a dozen round
and weighty, waiting
in all entirety, until
forced to collapse quietly,
taking in the break of keratin
and vacuuming air and
unconscionable
sunlight, and then
trailing the totality,
slavering as what was certain
looses at the seams
left hugging
in desperation
to the negative space:
a plaster cast, a non-portrait
of unfertilized yolk and runny
meringue, an unlikeness
holding against the light,
all membrane
and concavity
the kidnapped afterbirth
of the cage-free,
stinging the thief’s cast-iron
© 2017 Stellular Scribe
What I Do Not Know
bees rumble, and maybe they speak
in tongues to one another,
but despite the conversation,
they fly
days cycle, and maybe if not for
refracting light, all time would be
illegitimate, and waking in
dark would suffice
sleep ponders, and maybe it is a form
of dying, these lucid
systems of equations
that paralyze one’s
bloodstream
mothers wrangle, and maybe the braids
they twist are testaments
to living up to sons, to tightening
porose minds of
feminine truth
© 2017 Stellular Scribe
What I Know
I know that all voice is metal,
cutting blade
until the tongue softens its edge,
and in saying this, I seem to
only know of auditory
things — what else is there?
To see is to allude, in suggestion
I know the colors crawl,
but to speak is to make sense
of veins in rock, of
lustrous ore, not yet formed,
to break the leaf of
indeterminate ingot and
weave gold from its bedlam.
What else is there but crushing
noise, those atoms in their
offended chase,
that we, in a feat of muscle
and stringy vibration,
master?
© 2017 Stellular Scribe
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