Sara Henning
LOAM
Even without your wounding, the evening
wounds on, the planet slowly sodomizing
at its places of pressure, enabling us to sink
in a fizz naked of what the wind allows our hands:
a parade spent from cracks we forged, or a window
masqueraded as the dark. I cannot retrace
this ghosted road, this remittance of opposites
by common membrane. As circulating aperture
or labyrinth or lens, the twists of the grail
apprehend not my neck but the anchorage
of the fall, arbitrary and prime. I focus not
on the noose's axis as it tilts intact, nor
on deciphering my remains from the loam,
but instead on how the soil wasn't all
we wanted, or cared for. A deeper shade of dusk
in my mouth. Baggage of blue-black dust.
WATER: A MONTAGE
It is always these things
just reach-less,
lowering their stiffness
like bodies into water,
that define us.
Early stars
opening their mouths
in yesterday's lost storyline,
slivers dragged
through the sky by sunset,
the moon's malingering flare
taking hold.
The world stretching
its arms from us
like ocean suds,
falling,
unleashing their white.
That all we hold
are outlines left
and slipped back into,
some lost god
intensified by absence,
waiting for us to take skin.