Will Cordeiro

Poetry

Will Cordeiro has published work in Agni, Best New Poets, The Cincinnati Review, Copper Nickel, Palette Poetry, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, The Threepenny Review, and elsewhere. Will won the 2019 Able Muse Book Award for Trap Street. Will co-edits Eggtooth Editions and is grateful for a grant from the Arizona Commission on the Arts. Will currently teaches in the Honors College at Northern Arizona University.

 

Parentheses

(A flock of blackbirds escapes through a hidden door conjured by the dusk-lit figures a river scribbles; a young fox snouts in glowing mushrooms. Spiderwebs catch moonlight. Each twig on the understory glistens like the match-struck contours of a gaunt face. The wind worries a nest, and you listen. You listen to leaf-rot’s mother tongue. You stumble on a deer skull stuck in duff and humus, its eye-sockets quickened by two fireflies.) Hieroglyphs.

“ A set of parentheses is a temporal interlude, a parcel of speech, an aside, a discursive graft or digression. It's para-textual (beside the point) yet simultaneously within the text, as well. I imagine a creature's brief spell within the bounds of its egg, or that irregular shell of the self, in the precipitous moment in which something spills. In this poem, I hoped to create a lyric instance where the laws of nature seemed suspended, when one arrives outside one's own perspectival bracket and into another. Uncertain, wonderstruck, yet perceiving a world luminescent with decay, the speaker (and reader) stumble out of their gourd. All along, you realize, you've been waiting to be born. ”