From Vievee Francis:
Don’t you see? I am shedding my skins. I am a paper hive, a wolf spider,
the creeping ivy, the ache of a birch, a heifer, a doc. I have fallen from my dream
of progress: the clear-cut glass, the potted and balconied tree, the lemon-waxed
wood over a marbled pillar, into my own nocturne. The lullabies I had forgotten.
How could I know what slept inside?
– From Another Antipastoral
From Vanessa Angélica Villarreal:
I was a good wife
and an even better
wolf, jawed to a thicket of lonely
lungs trees I mean breathing, comet
come to me, come
a lone light, like the fire
that rips the mountainside’s
dress, I was a good
ununderstood
– From I Was a Good Wife
From Charles Ghigna:
From Kimberly Casey:
When you caught one to keep,
we took it home and I asked you to teach me.
You showed me how to spike the brain—
I thanked the fish, looked away, pressed down.
We bled it, shaved away the scales,
severed meat from bone.
I’m afraid of leaving my loved ones alone.
Flying into an endless sunset the next day,
a soft glow through the window,
and every passenger is glazed
a smooth bronze.
– From Golden Hour
From José Santos Chocano:
The way was black,
The night was mad with lightning; I bestrode
My wild young colt, upon a mountain road.
And, crunching onward, like a monster’s jaws,
His ringing hoof-beats their glad rhythm kept,
Breaking the glassy surface of the pools,
Where hidden waters slept.
A million buzzing insects in the air
On droning wing made sullen discord there.
– From A Song of the Road
From Shara McCallum:
The past
opens and opens, fleshing me
with loss.
I descend
to find my way,
I who am
haunted and a haunting.
From torrin a. greathouse:
How convenient
this word, beat, that lives in both the kingdoms
of brutality & song. The singer’s voice: a cry,
a moan, god’s name broken across a blade
of teeth. The riding crop & flog & scourge—
a wicked faith. A blood-loud devotion.
There is no prayer to save me from my flesh.
You can’t have the bible without the belt.
– From Belt Is Just Another Verb for Song
From Thomas Lovell Beddoes:
As mad sexton’s bell, tolling
For earth’s loveliest daughter,
Night’s dumbness breaks rolling
Ghostily:
So our boat breaks the water
Witchingly.
– From A Song on the Water
From Robert Haight:
The leaves, still soldered to their branches
by a frozen drop of dew, splash
apple and pear paint along the roadsides.
It seems we have glanced out a window
into the near future, mid-December, say,
the black and white photo of winter
carefully laid over the present autumn,
like a morning we pause at the mirror
inspecting the single strand of hair
that overnight has turned to snow.
– From Early October Snow
From Annie Finch:
Now when dying grasses veil
earth from the sky in one last pale
wave, as autumn dies to bring
winter back, and then the spring,
we who die ourselves can peel
back another kind of veil
that hangs among us like thick smoke.
Tonight at last I feel it shake.
I feel the nights stretching away
thousands long behind the days
till they reach the darkness where
all of me is ancestor.
– From Samhain
everywhere leonine. 