Winter/Spring 2015

Damascus
Youth-folly.
When I had the cream skin
I was a sinner.
Cavorting in each square
lifting my shapely leg
to piss in the fountains of God.
Then blight snapped my
proud princess neck,
maggots squirming around
my knocked down knees
as I gagged and praised
Holy! Holy! Holy!
My only remaining Suitor
unseen and taciturn.

Morning Prayer

Down in the valley the long coal trains run
regardless of whether we sleep or wake
mark their whistle or no. Terminus unknown
to us, they keep to their own times, just
as the stars do: private, flickering, remote.
All last night men wrestled their hearts
finally despairing at dawn that the angels
dark and wise would ever speak to them
while women wept and prayed and rent new
doors in collapsing bedrooms where children
dreamed of mucus eyed dogs flying over the tall
mountains which daily birth our wages, hem
our sweat, and occasionally, by the force of
some great, inviolate will—collapse upon us,
hot coil of brain cooling, freshly bruised hand
eventually spun into various strands of fossil:
vertebrae of fern, spine of shell, whorl of hearts-
pride’s knuckle. Hieroglyphs for another age
to rightly—dead wrongly—decipher.