THREE POEMS by Sébastien Luc Butler

by Sébastien Luc Butler / Tuesday, 14 November 2023 / Published in ISSUE 28

ARS POETICA

between sky & earth the mouth
perches its heavy want

its slick parables so far from
the fingers actual agents of ardor

i mistype poem as pome
from the french pomme de terre

apple of earth the earth
in the mouth my tongue

clutching the word sky
as a shovel turns over dirt

as the sound of dirt hitting
a casket the grief

of speaking what must be
made known & never
understood how else

do we get closer
with what fingers fail

to grasp time’s dissolution
childhood’s petrichor her ochre
hair o are you

the apple’s skin or the reflection
in the skin let me address you

fully as i should have from the start
as i know you void-throat

skull-capped-window cerulean-plowed-
field-of-nothing cathedral-of-pale-ants

tell me is it true

waking in you is like walking
in an orchard where all prior

is heard but only from
a far opaque distance

a radio’s underwater garble

tell me am i doing this right

after Lisa Russ Spaar

NOCTURNE w/ LILACS & RAIN

Before rain, we steal lilac cones from rich peoples’ gardens
one at a time until they make a bouquet. We go to bed

with feet the color of crushed blackberries, small stars
of broken glass kissing our soles & dream. As we dream,

it rains. Rain trickling off lilac cones like your tongue
lying limp & fat with sleep. Your tongue snug

in your mouth, next to me, & mine in my mouth.
Does a lilac like to smell itself? Is that its version of dreaming?

An unlit cop car slinks down the street, scuttling racoons
from their feast. A racoon in rain can smell like lilac, will sleep wet

curled among its sisters like a tongue among its teeth,
like bills in a mailbox. If our roof caves in

it will be because we sent the bills back
with a recording of rain inside, as if to say,

here, listen while you sleep. Hear the rain
touching the ungodly world as if this was its sole purpose.

A tremulous tongue, inventing desire.

LIKE THE SHADOW OF A WING

I too have stared at the stars & found it hard
to believe them indifferent. Who are we
to say we are new? & isn’t it like this:

not what’s discovered but what’s been known
& forgotten, despite ourselves. Despite saying
“I want to remember this.” The cold leeching

up my leg, my father’s black shape
moving away through the snow, farther
from our fire ring, across the latticework
of trees. Our necks craned in wonder at the sky.
Was it this, then, the first prayer? But already

he moves further & further away from me
& I have forgotten how to move. Where,
a moment ago he traced them, constellations
fall apart like wet paper. Like the body

of the rabbit we saw yesterday slip
from an osprey’s talons & tumble to earth
with a gymnast’s grace. & isn’t it like this?

The soul falls catches on itself keeps falling.
How when the darkness comes it passes over you
like the shadow of a wing. Soft as the inner thigh
of a rabbit.
Almost sweet.

Already
we’re retracing our footprints through the snow.
Already the light has moved on. Already
we’ve arrived back at the fire, already
I’m forgetting everything.

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About Sébastien Luc Butler

Sébastien Luc Butler holds an MFA from the University of Virginia, where he was a Poe/Faulkner Fellow in poetry, and served as poetry editor for Meridian. His poems have appeared in or are forthcoming from Narrative Magazine, Pleiades, Black Warrior Review, Southeast Review, the minnesota review, The Journal, Southern Indiana Review, and elsewhere. The recipient of the 2021 Hopwood Award for Poetry, and a semi-finalist for the Red Wheelbarrow Poetry Prize, he currently serves as an assistant editor at West Trade Review. Hailing from Michigan, he resides in Brooklyn with his partner and their cat.