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The snow is burnt.
A yellow rivulet has eaten
into sun spun puff
... and I am cold.
Virgin pace sighs
white kiss ethers
palmed as breath by
willing, wizened fir.
City sounds
enswaddled, now.
In stammering humility
at nascent inchworm life
... and I am less alone.
In equipoise
gelid air suspends
each sacral stride as
brittle gusts infuse a soft
in strewn aurora flakes....
Like surround of whirls, I drift.
Homeward now,
ablutions' penitent
... and yellow waits.
(for Dasha Shevchenko)
Ebon and ivory
Heirloom hilt protrudes from groin
As bone on bone promontory
I wait for the deluge: pain, blood ravage
But I am entranced to knees by trickles
Meandering left thigh as
Nascent mountain spring
Rubescent, luxuriant, numb.
I am dead for a crime for
Which there is no recourse.
I dissolve in Gaza mud
For Promethean desecration.
I am an American.
And as I become one with ooze
I smile at the historic justice
Of infinitesimal, intimate demise.
A gust whispers
"come."
I caress the history of
Circumstance
In the cooling dust.
In violet mutations, a coral reef grows
on once supple, needful skin.
Precisely timed birth convulsions
the hidden spiny urchin, seriate insufflate stone.
This aerate aquarium.
Ultimately human
access blocked by putrid petrifaction.
Evident, piercingly so.
Yet you, fool, reach out to tenderly brush
this prickle of cheek
Your wide eyed famine, drip-drip stump
evokes nothing.
It is what it is.
Luring lancet
peaks and crags.
Love's steadfast
maceration.
Constance Stadler has been writing, publishing, and editing poetry from the 'prehistoric' epoch of print journals to modern e-times. She was a former editor of South and West and is currently a contributing editor to the e-zine Eviscerator Heaven. Her most recent work appears in Ditch, ken*again, Pen Himalaya, Rain Over Bouville, Clockwise Cat, Hanging Moss, Neonbeam, and Gloom Cupboard. As a political anthropologist specializing in North Africa and a violinist, her influences are multiform. Work in formative years with the late poet Gwendolyn Brooks was seminal, but so was Sufi Dervish dancers, and the challenges of mastering Bruch's first concerto.