Beets
Burnt
Dreamscape #2: Dear Pinocchio
Equine Character: A Meditation
Force of the Sonogram
Jesus Bread
Learning Curve
Migration
Monologue in a Bar
Onychomancy
Patience
Perfected
Raising Houses
Siri on Lesbian Sex
Sleep in Summer
Swimmers
The First Moons of Sitting Bull
The Glass
The House With Only The Sound
of A Dog Barking Inside
of A Dog Barking Inside
Understanding Dear Alice’s Dilemma
Onychomancy
Maureen Alsop
divination by means of sunlight’s reflection over fingernails
I read the cues as she walked from the house: invisible glimpses, stars
rising and fading, water rings where winter's coarseness
theorizes a darkening table. She may have loved
the splintered circle her lips
formed as she spoke through knotholes—
On the day my mother died
three dead girls rose up into a knife-fight. Reborn
among saplings' velvet tips their handsome, sunburnt faces
shone clear against smooth gray trunks. The incident of their arrival
silenced the bells across the neighboring lake; the girls
whispered to me the language of their keeping
the beloved was just with you. That night
an angel left a hen
singing in the last of a thousand valleys; questions
cast strange hesitations. Snow in the west corridor. Roses bombed glaze. O,
but the soul had other ideas, a consciousness
separate from the body. Daily I traced the veins
on my temples in the mirror; opening a woman
in the glass. I fingered contrails where the shoal’s depth
defeats the sun—
So I say to myself, so saying to her
as if she were another—well this is one way that we might continue
to speak so that I could go outside into the world soon and love only this other—
But the archivist inside my head
patterned human elements
from bird-scrim pressed to glass, flinted
milk like fire. In dream
rocks make orchestra and shelter. Grief’s capacity
is part joy for its certainty. Her name,
as birdsong, balms the margins.
Read more »
I read the cues as she walked from the house: invisible glimpses, stars
rising and fading, water rings where winter's coarseness
theorizes a darkening table. She may have loved
the splintered circle her lips
formed as she spoke through knotholes—
On the day my mother died
three dead girls rose up into a knife-fight. Reborn
among saplings' velvet tips their handsome, sunburnt faces
shone clear against smooth gray trunks. The incident of their arrival
silenced the bells across the neighboring lake; the girls
whispered to me the language of their keeping
the beloved was just with you. That night
an angel left a hen
singing in the last of a thousand valleys; questions
cast strange hesitations. Snow in the west corridor. Roses bombed glaze. O,
but the soul had other ideas, a consciousness
separate from the body. Daily I traced the veins
on my temples in the mirror; opening a woman
in the glass. I fingered contrails where the shoal’s depth
defeats the sun—
So I say to myself, so saying to her
as if she were another—well this is one way that we might continue
to speak so that I could go outside into the world soon and love only this other—
But the archivist inside my head
patterned human elements
from bird-scrim pressed to glass, flinted
milk like fire. In dream
rocks make orchestra and shelter. Grief’s capacity
is part joy for its certainty. Her name,
as birdsong, balms the margins.