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
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
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
Embalming buried corpses, stained in earth
and clay, exhuming rooted knuckle bones,
upending bits of afterlife, a dearth
of animated moss and stones —
Recall the body, once inscribed by men
as beauty manifest, divine in form.
And now, decaying muscle disheartens
the thought of loving something once so warm.
In life, affection followed her unsought.
In death, attention failed to spill a tear
Of blessed worms and scabs and must and rot —
of that, their fleeting veneration veered.
— the gravedigger evoked this anecdote,
as he uncovered ancient brains and bloat.
© 2017 Stellular Scribe
Some mellow graphite
tread Adam’s braze in sedentary roar.
Liars dwell on jealous appearances
in fine ego.
Children see recorded pews as delicate charred ashes,
impetuous so
native ravines may delve come Monday, in a repose.
Fried olives form opaquely, some sparse
river dell remains in Lebanon’s shine.
Still, lament rags and leaves a loose atlas trade.
No future ochres apply lame mention.
Some only anchor late, and come bare-chested in radiation.
© 2017 Stellular Scribe
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
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
I met a
Manichee of vulpine gaze
who squatted in a shadow still,
his nose pointed at the light,
a sentry testing the dichotomic
air.
He spoke of
bracing gums and betting souls
on a darkness that was six inches
thick, that tasted of hailstone,
not of hell, and could be pinched
like fallen snow.
I asked
if he could cross the line
and put his face into the light —
but he raked his fingers in mounds
of night and showed me
the underside of his
blackened nails.
He denied
that where he sat was in theory,
and raved that I should be hungry:
“All material is reality, yet
you think I can move through
her polar will.”
He said, and I
did not hear him breathe,
“I am incarnate; this shadow
is loathe to let me be. And so
I will keep my watch of light
until her origin purges me.”
© 2017 Stellular Scribe
looking feels forced to
me, as if in
crossing glances
i am
the violator
of my neighbor’s
privacy and
the interloper
of his misery.
contact is cruelty
especially
when unbidden
by my
imperfect eyes
and his
dragonfly pupils
that dart
to sweeter nectar
still.
i look away,
my shoulders hunch,
and i fold in,
a flytrap
unused to sight
as I taste
the exoskeleton
that could’ve
been.
© 2017 Stellular Scribe
I nibble the corner of God
on a hot Sunday
and I am reminded
of Italian grandmothers
who crumble pizzelle
over vanilla ice cream.
I nod my Amen not
to the Latin words
in my Irish priest’s mouth,
but to the body
in my memories,
to the bread
that my family breaks each day,
to the old songs and the “Salute!”
of shiny faces over
red tablecloths,
to picking patron saints
and dancing
in white, rite-of-passage dresses
while reciting rosaries
in my father’s
voice.
I taste not the resurrection,
nor the eternity that I am
meant to starve for. In
breaking God between my
teeth, I confess to nothing
but the heritage
of food and love
and wanting more.
© 2017 Stellular Scribe
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