4 poems
Pressing at the base of the sky
after Deborah Heissler
the power of mountains
pregnant movements
pressing at the base of the sky
The human hand holds
twenty-seven bones
spring signals promise
a clear yes resounding in green
You will live a long life, yes.
Here, this broken line shows a child,
and this one. Another.
when there are no predictions
to capture the summer,
we work with our hands
grounding an absence quite complicated
the contact between each digit
a little
listening
what we lose
will amount to silence—
tissue-anchored exile
anchored in the fascia
awakens when the body
wakes, stands up when
the body stretches, in fact
tries to leave the body behind
without the weight of words all around
we siphon the fluids of others
and fall without our tarsals
intact, when titled our feet
frankly break us. betrayal is never
external. we amber the other
whose health lines, whose life lines and wrinkles
we capture in culture, each palm to the other
our skin holds us in. our shell’s how
we make us then hell keeps us out of the house.
While meanwhile
after Marie Étienne
The war went on a long time.
We weren’t ourselves who came out
the other side.
We wrote impenetrable letters—
Invention dreamt us
out loud: droned
little bird looking
for a death song—
dreams of confounding
metal shuffled, try looking up
hey, look, we hear it,
hey look—
whereas soldiers stepping
in symphony,
so much, I’ll go, too
soldiers in ballad ground
because soldiers project
their gravatars onto the world,
the soldier has
taken apart the wind,
the red hawk’s claw, its wings.
What clicks underneath
the surface? Myofacial
buildup or the scratch-cloth
of the uniform, chaffing meanwhile
the horizon line
disappears just over
the horizon line,
the soldiers’ wings went that way—
each chevalier
crossing a unique horizon
over each indistinct house
and yet these soldiers
did the disappearing and
yet the people who lived
there vanished
while meanwhile
some other we online posted
letters for our children’s names,
the reality of identity
muted from predators, and
we watched debates that
predated those senses we held
in common, while we denied
any voice of dissent
her outside voice and then
charged it hysterical,
because negation is a part
of the human imagination and
we do what we can to
silence whatever we can
The spring, in fact, is freezing
after Deborah Heissler
one ground in front of the other
space naming each thing
its babywalk
the measure of spring—
and the sight that carries
the thin, cool air of the morning
in through the window
the sun’s coming up
over the desert
now the eye’s aged and drinking
from lenticular clouds
the dream
is my evidence,
cleaving the valley,
the numbers, of course,
of birds
morning voice is a whisper,
just like that, over and
particularly
on the first day of spring
the roofs remain frosted
I’m sleepwalking fingers
my brain flinches
reversewakes my body
not broken these hands
tenderly remember
my face
these digits
pinked
what’s more, what’s cold
this odd little offer of winter
in a glass
on the bedside, breath
covering the mirror
with clouds
Sunset assist
after Carole Darricarrère
The sunset will assist you by way of small sound, but you must imagine it.
You must imagine your life a remarkable fresco and underneath your skin
the birth of new skin, subcutaneous right to the seat of emotion—that sudden emotion like a prayer flanking the hairs on your body because deep interior space is our last chance for privacy.
Elemental color theory carries that interior space toward its Latinate equivalent and we find ourselves dysregulated in musculature the way that emotion is musical and our inside-place is a part of what spills onto the landscape. Privacy forms in abgrandia, underneath the eyelids, where incandescences lead to big gestures—
—lead to adverse reactions to gravity and mouth movements—and that open field has been occupied by a part of the body all along. The inside is outside and the colors are over; the sunset continues in another part of the country.
Prayers mark a season of history closing / the daylight closes its amber eye meanwhile the aperture begins just behind the sternum and radiates toward the jaw, the temporal bones, and with that we enter the third night.
Laura Wetherington's first book, A Map Predetermined and Chance (Fence Books), was selected by C.S. Giscombe for the National Poetry Series. She is the poetry editor for Baobab Press and currently teaches creative writing at Amsterdam University College and in SNC Tahoe's low-residency MFA program.