A Farewell from the Sloth of Space
Speed is a black tongue among mouths,
unfurling in hush, like a mutation of
thrushes.
We molt from gaunt to dazzling plume —
just the cavity of flat, interstellar seas
to bear us up like a dead march,
and a crown of calculus to weave the way.
We need what thrives from heat to atone
for what badlands we leave behind.
We flee the vast heat, mega typhoons,
sacrifices
to volcanoes, undead firestorms, and the
superliners
rich in triggermen piled high in rations and
disdain.
Shrug the pull of our greedy, blue gravity
well,
of hot dark matter departed, we rise and
erupt
in tritium rage to duck another sermon
of banned books burned, another Brownshirt
cabal,
another Sunday morning blitz gifting us
ashes to eat
from the nirvana of earthly life now in the
kiln.
In our lightship, we see the colours of
machines gallop
ahead to paint the void trailing our
newfound freedom,
like the artful wren weaving a hidden nest
of starlight
right under the eagle’s wing — a deepness
of fable
to hoist us up high above the blues in the
serpent spume.
Our keel feels closer to splitting open a monster
in our honeyed path cracking wide before
us,
the wilderness of our winking stretch
across the cold
vacuum words
let go of orbit:
spheres, shelter, lush falling away.
But we won’t get anywhere fast enough to
know
the time lost or gained by this place of
truce —
the sublime jest across the darkest moss.
Instead, we drink only the disquiet of eyes
from other passersby, tied down, reclined,
our Heavenly Observer Corps,
like ecstatic dolls bedded in the antiquity
of flesh
and the pure frenzy of stillness in motion,
of human commotion in space, in the space
between the in-between spell.
We open words to one another, like cherries
in a jar
of exquisite intervals, and then we sing
sour praise
to salute the barren weight of perpetuity.
The
Old Man in the Sky
He is all I see come noon.
The
yellow shroud, the red still to make.
At
night, his winking, snow-white pricks nuzzle.
My eyes worry to hold his charity so
dwarfed overnight
and
not swollen full of future giants,
a
ritual of feeling slighted by his bounty,
because he wants nothing new
beyond
more gleaming bodies
to
spiral him in spirited favour.
I am just vapours in his expanse of
golden-glow days,
trying
to break time free from the dark cloud-horses,
to
stretch out like an ocean pier beneath him,
speed
limit gone; shoes tossed.
Because he conquers my desolation more than
any horn,
or
dead soldier, or wish can hold in noise,
or
all the hollows of fury in deep space,
blinding
me to his bubble of gravity.
I must orbit him in a slow burn, and my
turns around him
deepen
into vast geometries of surrender.
By closing my eyelids,
his
long fingers draw out heat
in
the headlong race to be with him,
his
eye sucks in volumes of my words
flowing
through flaring, bloodshot rings,
all
obscurity, every confession, foreseen.
I am never again astonished,
except
to watch his sculpted arms and legs
cocoon
me in hot, telescopic wickedness.
His righteous, fiery sins don’t leave me
high
and
gasping for doubt,
or
dry and grasping for hope.
He marks me his,
my
pink flamboyance of skins,
enough
to build a tomb
of
colour for his light to hold
nothing
but lustrous hydrogen lost
and
exotic helium found.
Like the sun dancers worshipping him
with
sage wreaths and whistles,
and
their pale-painted crusts of skin shed,
he
covets the cold-blooded sunset boys
who
jump naked from warm tongues of rock
into
bright pools below to bathe in his ecstasy
and in verbs once thought to mourn his
cyclic decay.
Parliament
In the dead shell center of an old elm
sorrow
Tree sheared, hollow charred by a bolt of
zeal
Stands the owl with her pink salmon king
Being deftly returned to primal fashion by
talon
And beak spilling riddle scales, his crown:
A hemorrhage of witness fish testimony.
In the court of conjuring artistry by cuts,
The owl is well-known for her divination,
An ancient pattern of foreseeing through
prey
By dancing entranced the blood-jewelled
stains
To foster the owlets in journeys ahead.
She unwinds drifts down to judge the river
again,
Its snowy bank of thorns, leaving pits
behind
As she stamps along the watery edge,
piercing
At flickers to feed the plot, to open a
shambles
As the proper name of hunger slips over the
tip
Of her tongue away under the surface of
swift
Bronze waves auguring to see the signs
In the night: elsewhere in her passage
through
The tree wings, a tracing mist trails,
drawing her
Back to the nest, where the back spatter
remains
Stigmata to be read, or heard, or cast off
in swings
Until she knows the crime to be forgiven,
Whether stabbing, beating, or passive
pools,
The king’s blood still stands to rule the
parliament
Of prescient owls wherein mandibles clack,
Until she rests on a perch to hoot just
once:
Her decree as psychopomp to follow the king
Into the place where being feared or
revered
Comes with no cost but the lustration of
shame.
Mikal Wix is
a queer writer from Miami with degrees in literature and creative writing
serving as an Associate Poetry Editor with West Trade Review. Their poems are found or
forthcoming in the
North American Review, Berkeley Poetry Review, Tahoma Literary Review, Moss
Puppy, Olit, Door = Jar, Gone Lawn, and elsewhere. Other creative work,
including book reviews, can be found here: https://linktr.ee/mikalwix
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