PRAYER TO ST. MARTHA by Leah Silvieus
Late August the galley blooms
fruit flies, smoke-winged & garnet-eyed, circling the soft caves
of over-sweet summer fruit: pear & blueberry, clingstone
peach. Each night I pray resurrection
but am deceived. Faith is not feast
but desire, not beauty of the table but what drags us starving
there – what was buried inside
the sweetness, inside
the plum’s bruised heart: larvae, pearling. Saint dear
of my difficult hunger:
cloy me
mote me
rise me up
- Published in Series
THREE POEMS by Leah Silvieus
Stone flung to crater: we gather what we can of the dead, but they remember us in our entirety, filling our pockets with bones and pink rhododendron.
We pass the pavilion, toward the wooden skiff, its nets suspended in loam. You winnow through the ruin of porous shore, your hands murky with sea urchins, palms stung with their dying stars. The basalt gods gaze on, graved full of moon. They eclipse dark at dusk. They are not our gods.
You move among them, a constellation of absence threaded through the fractured lights
[1] Jeju Do is the name of an island located off the southeast coast of South Korea. Hallasan is the name of the volcanic mountain on the island.
STILL LIFE WITH FALLEN GAME
For (and after) J
At the edge of want, everything is cast
into ebbed relief; not only each
waxed and gorgeous object,
but the distance between:
boar-shadow and bloodied quail, which is to say,
the negative space that desire is:
between what we want and what we are capable of,
overripe peach as slow eclipse ::: lover
turning afield – praise be
hunger and fear, the brutal devotions
that will lean us out
praise be to what this dark bounty
would hallow us into
EPITHALIUM WITH SPIDER AND SPARROW
See what our bodies make
of each other, my seraph sung
from reed and seeding stalks;
my blue-mouthed beauty –
see what ellipses we
spin and snare, radiant
of limb and muddied wing.
Issue 5 Contents NEXT: Two Poems by Gina Vaynshteyn