In Accelerated Silence by Brooke Matson (best ereader manga TXT) 📕

was a voice

crying, Stop.

When I touch your photograph

on the refrigerator, the spiral of my fingerprint

marks your cheek

like a small halo of cloud.

Life doesn’t wait, I hear you say.

Outside, the starlings sing

the afternoon to grey while lilacs

abandon their fragrance.

iii. Operating Room

The thin knife that severed your tumor—

severed you

from your body—

it cleaves me still.

Those dead scientists asked a question that killed

and we are still

dying slowly from the answer.

Microscopic cells swell like buds

of peony—swell and split

like that first flower of fire.

iv. Hiroshima

Think of a lit match—

how its head vanishes.

v. Fallout

All light was once matter

and all matter shall become light.

Evening draws me back

into this bedroom, as it did on days we woke

together, when your fingers found the sheet

and pulled it the extra inch to cover

my bare shoulder. The starlings sing

at morning and evening,

the same doorway—sing

though the hollow your hips

carved on the bed has no mass

to hold its shape. I want to be folded whole

into the light that fills your place.

OUR LADY OF GUADALUPE

In the hammock of his robes, she piles roses

like a bounty of heads—

swollen apologies

from the blue cistern of sky.

Why burden a boy with these soft bodies,

washed, like the dead, with rain?

Go, she said, and show no one. I used to keep her

on my kitchen mantel, the spangled

bloom of her body papered around the tall

glass candle, the light-filled mandorla splintering

behind her. As a teen, I had a friend who loved

his faith so much he tattooed her down

the length of his spine, nape

to hip. I watched drops of water star

the corona of her veil as he slid

from the lake at summer camp and told myself

all love was a devotion. Now roses rot

on the side of my house, withered husks

of sparrows I slap

from stems. When I learned remission

was out of reach, I hurled

the candle across the room. A vessel

was all I wanted—beatitude of wax,

axiom of I understand, I intercede, a reprieve

whispered in the dark, where our bodies weigh

as much as rose-scent. Once I massacred

a rosebush, not knowing to cut

above the bud eye,

how each limb feeds

the next like a vein, how the arms

can dry up like rivers, dammed. I slammed

that heavy candle in the trash. It sank

like a full bottle of wine.

Anticlimactic. Cliché. Not enough, I tore

her icon from the wall—the one I lacquered

onto cedar that summer

as a teen. My initials

at the bottom—who was she?

METAPHORS OF MASS DESTRUCTION

1. Cancer:

the typist’s fingers miss a key

on the invite

taking care to bend the brads

she hand-delivers

the manila

upon receipt the President

launches a missile

2. Fission:

her grandmother’s necklace snaps

at the party

freshwater pearls

riot

ricochet

roll

under the sink

down heat shafts

look you’ll never find them all

besides the string is broken

3. Grief:

a fingertip traces the rim

of an empty wineglass

until it

howls

PSALM OF THE ISRAELI GRENADE

Six hundred and thirteen seeds of a pomegranate

are six hundred and thirteen commandments

of scripture singing lead rivets

in the ribs of the enemy. I am the mitzvah arcing

through their open windows hung with thyme.

Into their lemon orchards, chartreuse heads

broken like dandelions

in a hurricane. Centuries shorn to ash

in nanoseconds—a psalm of cinders

over scored land. Each death

sends a chorus of detonations ringing

like rain on the Red Sea. The waves

pass through one another

as ghosts walk

through walls. I want to sing, Father.

Pull the ring of the pin and release me—

a red dove erupting from the cliffside, russet earth

blown heavenward on a burnt

offering of belief. Isn’t that

Your unspoken commandment? A slaughtered ram

at Rosh Hashanah: may we be head not tail.

Not the wailing. Not the carcass

carried through the streets.

But the dark sun

sailing through a kitchen window. The crack

of light lifting feet. Brow split

like a pomegranate within a kerchief.

NEWTON’S APPLE

Came to him casually, a wild syllable

of color, a ripe proposition.

Bruised on the grass, a casual reminder

of our entrance on the earth.

Anchored to field, a weight

that tipped the scale,

Eclipsed the sun, the pocket of its blushing

body burnished.

Cleaved his angular thoughts like a joke.

Weighed in the cup of his hand, a mass

of lead, of red, of laughter.

Dropped again to be sure.

Bruised again / again / again /

PRISM

i. Dissection

Morning shatters a water glass, casts

rainbows on formica.

I am not fooled. Don’t try to convince me

any of these are promises. I’ve lost

too much—his curves

immersed in earth while flowers and berries and birds

make use. What could You possibly

offer me now?

An empty glass.

A man pared

into colors. His laughter peeled

away like the skin of an apple.

ii. Black

Priests wear black to tell their flock, I am already dead

and therefore cannot die.

We should all wear black—not only

for mourning. Ashes every day

as protest.

Obsidian that shoulders the quiet

story of fire.

Black like outer space—

the balance of probability between her hips.

I say her because like Eve she does not

obey the law.

She eats whatever she likes.

iii. Death

The prism we pass through.

The nameless blade

that strips us to wavelengths.

Narrow bridge we cross

into the body of another.

iv. White

The science teacher crossed three spotlights on the wall:

green, blue, and red.

My hypothesis was grey. Others

said purple, surely. Or brown.

He darkened the room, slid

each over the other: a triangle of pristine white

light

where they collected.

Explain this, he said.

Not one of us could.

v. Wake

Can light break

or does it, like water, extend

into ocean, conform

to its container, swallow all assaults, never shatter

no matter how many stones

you throw?

vi. Electromagnetic field

I didn’t intend to end up here.

I didn’t mean to go beyond

black and white, our beginning

and his ending, beyond the fence of the visible

spectrum. I find myself wandering, like Hertz and Ritter,

into sound and temperature—other

means of communication.

vii. Others

slide through us:

ossified X-rays drift like smoke, the husks

of broken bones. Infrared waves

slither over summer streets. Ultraviolets

singe skin while gammas punch holes

in every cell they find.

They, too, believe in their solitude.

They, too, try to notch

a word into the world.

viii. Waves

It was never my intention to return to the beginning.

Never

to return to this field—

to the bright spring day that followed

his departure. It was here—

right here I trod a path through the tall grass.

It rippled like an ocean

in every direction—hemmed together

where my body passed through.

ELEGY IN THE FORM OF AN OCTOPUS

I gasp when her body ripples from rust

to silver. Her tentacles fumble the mussel

at the edge of the tank. I’ve been

that desperate lately, willing to break

delicate things for hunger’s sake, like the ivory

dishes that