Some flowers change color when pollination is complete,
signaling freshly dilated rooms. Others open and close to control the timing of
the act. Forms of enticement: sugary cadence, nectar parlors, pollen deposited
on head. A place to find shelter from ruined blue hems. A single nest scrape. I
drank from flawless perfume, your voice.
Transition upends us. No footsteps, therefore no light enters
the house. Persistent reliability on the ephemeral: silt arc, lunar names,
pouring felt into glass goblets, a liquid pliancy, fabric on which we divine.
Dear oracle, I’ve worked endlessly for this tiny corner. Drop-stitch resolve.
Indivisible—clotted from shadows. Gaze from fringed skirts.
If you write by illumination of any candle you incline toward
an intimate circle of light. Where wolves become less visible shadows moving
across a field, tired green spectroscopes. An image of curtained sun becomes
the strangest mammal. Byzantium drawing machine. The deported quiet for which
one waits and eventually ravishes. Inside thread apothecaries you named my hair.
Rope pulled with eyes.
Laynie Browne is a poet, prose writer, teacher and
editor. She is author
of thirteen collections of poems and three novels. Her most recent collections
include a book of poems You Envelop Me (Omnidawn 2017), a novel Periodic Companions (Tinderbox 2018) and short fiction in two editions, one
French, and one English in The Book of Moments (Presses universitaires de rouen et du havre, 2018).
Her honors include a 2014 Pew Fellowship, the National Poetry Series Award
(2007) for her collection The Scented Fox, and the Contemporary Poetry Series Award (2005) for her
collection Drawing of a Swan Before Memory. Her poetry has been translated into French, Spanish,
Chinese and Catalan. Her writing has appeared in many anthologies including The Norton Anthology of Post Modern Poetry (second edition 2013), Ecopoetry: A Contemporary American Anthology (Trinity
University Press, 2013), Bay Poetics (Faux Press, 2006) and The Reality Street Book of Sonnets(Reality Street, 2008). She teaches at University of
Pennsylvania and at Swarthmore College.
the Tuesday
poem is curated by rob mclennan
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