My son wants to know if a wormhole
is how Elijah was taken into the sky,
as he watches snow whiten the lawn
like Heaven coming to us; why snow
doesn’t last forever and what
forever is anyway, wanting four sides
or an axis, something sensible
as science to his twelve-year-old mind.
His grandmother replies, says we will
be taken like Elijah in the rapture.
He equates it to alien abduction,
to the disappearance of Jack
up the beanstalk or Alice into the mirror,
remembering other worlds he has visited
in his imagination, picturing God
at the computer, His finger on delete.
He tells her his teacher says we are
seventy-two percent water, as he exhales
on the window pane, writes his name,
explains the existence of moisture
that forms, then evaporates, the snow
beginning to leave, little by little,
as breaths of steam ride a stream
of sunlight into opening clouds.
We sit in a circle. Faces stare into each other.
Fire illumines how the years singe our features, we feed it
our shared hours, time burned in effigy, a fitting ritual
for the longest day with its extra minutes to spare.
The house and barn are mysterious in shadow,
a colt’s eyes eerie in the dark corral.
We all hold hands, prance like show horses, weave
through the woods and out again with sporadic displays
of nickers and neighs, growing older, dancing, becoming
young, like the waxing and waning of the moon.
When heat hovers over glowing coals, we offer up
unwanted hurts that smolder, poems and photos
that kindle regret, all we hope to purge from the past.
The letter I wrote you four years ago, but never mailed,
curls its edges inward. The words that pleaded
to be read, until I loved how I hated them, disappear
into a hot dot of light. At midnight, we float on our backs
in the pool, weightless as ash under the cool gaze
of stars in a wide country sky, forgiveness
a distant heaven that burns. Disintegrated paper
and charred snapshots whisper from seared cinders.
The veils are thin between the worlds.
Published in Dirt Sandwich, Press 53
“A poet died today,”
the two-week-old newspaper reports
from beneath lifeless bodies of black bass
as I filet them, stew for the crew,
slide the slippery entrails and eyes to one side,
wash away blood, lay them out by the rail
like corpses on a slab, while others flail and lash,
shaking their small bucket of water and salt.
The poet’s name was Barbara,
biology maintaining she was mostly water,
connected to all leaving things by the sea,
by rain and rivers, sweat and saliva.
The ocean and sky have glared at me so long
I feel bodiless. The deep, a communal soup,
watches all my motions, the surge and ebb of me.
Gray backs of dolphin surface
and disappear. Light, slight as a minnow,
dives into the dark of the liquid horizon.
Published in Dirt Sandwich, Press 53
You cannot get caught
in the same rain twice.
A transparent pearl
will not cling to your lash
when you close your eyes
to drink from the sky.
The heavens will not descend
like music. Wet notes
will not shatter when they touch
the strain of your tongue.
You will not notice how rain
tastes so strangely of nothing.
Your thirst will not be quenched
if you console every cloud.
People will pass all around
but they will see only
how the sun breaks on your back
as you walk away.
Published in Dirt Sandwich, Press 53
I fit into their backs when I was three,
hid behind her skirt, chewed on its hem
when strangers came. She held me
on her lap, head pulled to the pillow
of her breast with the hush of her hand.
She kept everything inside, breathing out
only sighs. Once, she let herself laugh.
It started like a struggle, until
her whole body shook in a stifled gasp.
It has been eleven years since she left.
I live 300 miles from her grave, dig
through old photos, dying to write
a decent poem, something lasting—
while others read only her carved name.
Mornings, I open my eyes, wake
from dreams of funeral roses, dozens
of flowers she never once received in life,
petals falling like prayers come apart.
How composed she fell into death,
her silence thriving, a living thing, a legacy
to hide behind, a hem to hang onto
on this journey out of myself.
Published in Dirt Sandwich, Press 53
© 2018. The Athenaeum Press at Coastal Carolina University.
All work copyright of their respective authors.