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

shade shifted.

The day they removed the second tumor

from his brain, I stumbled into the garden.

There it stood, silver-limbed and hardy

in the noonday glare. I borrowed an axe.

Hacked it down to an ashen foot. Snapped

the long limbs into sticks.

Months after the funeral, now strong enough

to venture out of doors, thin

and swathed in a robe, what a shock

to see it full and flourishing and larger than before—

hummingbirds dashing between branches

like watercolor brushes.

LITHIUM

Fine like talc. The dust of doves. Faith

you can rub between fingers.

I know you want to believe in objectivity

but let me tell you: your perception

of this moment floats like a darkroom photograph

in a wash of chemistry. Clarity

is what you desire. The fine details. The iris

of his eye daring into focus. I can give you clarity.

I was the red in first fires—a restless, reactive alkali.

When Robert Lowell slept on poets’ lawns

and believed he could halt

traffic with his arms, I recognized the deficiency

in his rabid mania, his melancholia. Listen—

happiness hinges on a fulcrum

of salt and light. David Lovelace said, I’ve been accustomed

to mysteries, holy and otherwise. And don’t you want

both water and wine? Divine and human?

Illumination by intermediary

is still illumination. I can be that.

I can be that for you. Lovelace also said,

Some of us take communion or whiskey

or poison. I lay out my wares

and like a scattered flock of rock pigeons

you come tottering to the bread.

SONNET ON A HOOK

Her white-limbed torso flails into your palm

just like the salmon you caught as a boy—

your first fish. The crescent moon of its hip

beat silver on the belly of the boat,

eyes wide and mouth agape. The tightened line

flecked the deck with red, made you sob and beg

to throw it back—to end those brutal oscillations.

Now the perpetual vowel

of her anatomy opens, slaps your palm,

and you are hook and lure and gasping boy

both caught and catching in a woman’s hip

so that she bows and arcs supine, a boat

unmoored, her jaw unhinged. Let go the line

of where her body breaks and yours begins.

ODE TO A ROTTING APPLE

And it occurred to me, standing there in that bleak, cavernous space, that nobody is ever just one thing…. If the multiverse was about choices, and all possible choices were being made, then we might be all those things and everything in between.

—A.W. HILL

Consider yourself a red house

containing five

slender black doors each containing

a different house

in a different country

Choose one

Turn the knob like a period that extends

to comma that softens the milky

page of your ribs

Let your bruise be passage

to your escape / exit / entry

Be trajectory

gnarled little snake-root

cracking the rim of a seed ellipsis

at the end of the book

Hum at a frequency

only the dead can hear

Let gravity hold you / unfold you

into a thousand rooms one for each

variety of your kind

Recite their names remember nothing

decides the fate of a body

that speaks the language of infinite the lexicon

of overcome and this is not their house

their doors

Utter an impossible thing unfurl green

syllables from a new tongue

Be multiplicity

blossoms freed over the field

Be Honeycrisp / Granny Smith /

Braeburn / Gala / Ambrosia

Construct a new stanza

AMARYLLIS

the amaryllis split this morning into scarlet

tongues after I made love to him or rather

to his ghost it’s the same now to my body

sometimes I cry but today something shuddered

loose inside me and my brain recited God

from God light from light true God from true

God and on and on the whole creed

rushed back to me I hadn’t spoken it in years

and only then in communion with strangers

who filled in gaps where my lips

stumbled here it was in its entirety

whole beautiful verses repeating like a song

only weeks ago the amaryllis was a tight fist

on my windowsill absorbing the thin

light of winter the ice is so thick

it will never release us God from God

light from light one plus one plus one

does not equal three but one again after it wilts

when I cut away the head another

will rise in its place and another after that

and another after that

ALCHEMY

since our bodies last kissed I cry

crossing the ocean between my thighs

it used to be enough

to be a single woman sailing

through her own body steady

and determined

but now I am rudderless

and longing buoys me toward

the ridged fire of the horizon

into which gulls wheel

and disappear—the crucible

where sailboats melt to gold arc wide

into the hip of evening

what is it we carve

into each other when the waves

swallow us when we surface

like survivors unclear

whether we’ve woken in paradise

or death the story

necessitates we continue

that the salt-burned body

keeps breathing

ODE TO THE RETURNED

Give me the wolves that returned to the sea

eons ago when ocean was old hat and every

mammal was walking. Give me the sledge

of their legs into surf, the sheet of salt

drawn across matted fur—a lullaby

forgotten. The slow erase of an amber iris

for a star of obsidian, the algorithm

of wind for the gloss of current.

Claw for fin. Fur for skin. Give me their cold

freedom, the period

of sun dimming, then blotted

by depth. Give me the wide comb

of their bellies, throats like sieves,

the ocean passing through them—growl

turned to howl, turned to song.

ODE TO THE SUN

cracking the boughs

of my neighbors’ pines

with your light—

your first appearance

in what feels like months

let me stand in my bathrobe

one foot in the pantry

the other in the kitchen and lean

to the left

so your fire

finds my irises

I want to be

blinded so when I close

my eyes even then

you are with me—

thumbprint

on the darkness—

NOTES

The poems in this collection first appeared in the following publications:

CALYX: “Elegy in the Form of Steam” (as “Tea Kettle”)

Copper Nickel: “Amaryllis”

Crab Creek Review: “Ode to Dark Matter,” “Lithium”

Isthmus: “Newton’s Apple”

Laurel Review: “Electron Cloud,” “Orionid Meteor,” “Elegy in the Form of Porcelain”

Pacific Northwest Inlander: “Elegy in the Form of a Pomegranate” (as “Ode to a Pomegranate”)

Permafrost: “Metamorphosis”

Poetry Northwest: “Elegy in the Form of an Octopus” (as “Ode to Chromatophores, Ode to an Octopus”)

Portland Review: “Impossible Things,” “How to Eat a Pomegranate”

Potomac Review: “Maybe”

Rock & Sling: “Eve Splits the Apple,” “Prism”

Sierra Nevada Review: “Broaden the Subject”

TAYO: “Law of the Conservation of Mass,” “Metaphors of Mass Destruction”

Willow Springs: “Neurosurgery” (as “Neurosurgery Sonata”)

“Electron Cloud,” “Eve Splits the Apple,” and “Neurosurgery” have been nominated for the 2020 Pushcart Prize by Laurel Review, Rock & Sling, and Willow Springs.

“Psalm of the Israeli Grenade” quotes the Book of Deuteronomy: “May we be head not tail,” often used as a blessing for Rosh Hashanah. The final