Poetry |

“Shorn,” “Visitation” & “All movement mimics other movement”

Shorn

 

mine is a self I wish I didn’t have

to look at, a head bobbing neckless

on a heath ocean. waves disrupt reflection,

I say, for a bloom born of

a time of temperance, your ticking is lush.

which is to say, I miss afternoons detonating

in the growing sound of insects. limes on the lip.

by the real ocean, scotch broom

covers the path, too much to move through

without rubies beading a scratch. it’s just blood. the hedge overgrows

itself, is filled with spiders cottoning

the barbs, their own catching mechanism, the silk reels

in on itself to its slack droplet. I am the directionless

vertebra digging into a lavender sandbar. such lovely. when

we were new you brought something

out of me, a coil that got fatter as it emerged. a sponge taken from

its plastic pill, and let to soak

 

 

*     *     *     *     *

 

 

Visitation

 

 

in the corner a woman’s face

abandons its sharpness

 

 the light on her glasses

 

she flits away from my

eager hands

 

floating through contour

 

conversations

with my mother, her face obscured,

her breath turning

milky, opaque enough to hide her

eyelashes.

 

When she

was dying, reduced

to a state of yes and no, there were

no more words, she told me

with her eyes, syntax beads

unstringing, replacing

each of my sounds

with a darkening iris, the slighting

dilation between thoughts        where is she     drifting

in my white   or is she    just

the darkness

a shadow on shadow, a place my mind

blotted out

in the recess of the sun.

 

 

*     *     *     *     *

 

 

All movement mimics other movement

 

 

Small birds that flit

between bushes in December make me

remember movement

as it could be:

a quick sparkle or a hurried arrow through the snow,

hanging baubles along the way.

 

I imagine a string suspended after each of the starling tails,

and soon the snowy airspace

fills

 

with a knot dense and beautiful.

 

It is the shape that ice takes in shallows:

shoals of featherlike fibers

encased in glass

where the grass crosses itself

and pokes up among snow.

Contributor
Kelly Rose Hoffer

Kelly Rose Hoffer earned an MFA in Poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her debut book of poems Undershore (2023) was selected by Diana Khoi Nguyen for the 2021 Lightscatter Press Prize. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Gulf Coast, Chicago Review, Denver Quarterly, and Mississippi Review, among others. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Literatures in English at Cornell University.

Posted in Poetry

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