A silver splinter lodges itself into the membrane of a word where my mother waits
in the dark.
Saint Anthony sits in the far corner of the other dark window, sighing as he checks the time. One flash of starlight crosses centuries of lost items, but he can only think of hunger now.
His salvation is not our concern in this obsidian wind.
An architecture of desire blooms in towers across either side of a quiet realization, striking its many heads hard against a flint sky as if in answer to the question I want to ask
Even if it is a just punishment
A memory has gone missing in its thousand strands of silver,
Fine-tuned to match the weight of my mother’s hand across the surface of every moment
The opal of her palms her white metal fingers cold and thin
Set the broken bones of truth
clatter out demands on keyboard
Grip the bars of a hospital bed.
These same hands with which she selected every shining seed
And strung them all together around the throat of a rising moon,
Joining the thumb and pointer finger together in attitude of blessing
As she clasps the story shut. Now
A dense forgetting rushes out in rivers of dark ink
Somewhere in the valley between my spine and breast,
pooling in the left chamber of an obsidian heart
cloven from the lithic core of grief.
A prayer shudders with earth pulse and unfurls itself in
Seismic longing, lapping at the veins with its forked tongue.
I have tasted the thermal map of memory
Here in between the crease of the dry autumn leaf and the damp rot of older seasons
Where I dig myself into time with one long fingernail.
But there is still this question I must ask:
Tell me, Saint Anthony, where did it go
The holy blood relic --
the handing down --
is it mine?
Author Bio:
Sonya was born as a bat in a golden cave in the Southwest. After dreaming herself into human, she saw that she has opposable thumbs, and has enjoyed using them to write, paint, and make messes. Her work has appeared in Latin American Literary Review, Cholla Needles, La Piccioletta Barca, and others.
in the dark.
Saint Anthony sits in the far corner of the other dark window, sighing as he checks the time. One flash of starlight crosses centuries of lost items, but he can only think of hunger now.
His salvation is not our concern in this obsidian wind.
An architecture of desire blooms in towers across either side of a quiet realization, striking its many heads hard against a flint sky as if in answer to the question I want to ask
Even if it is a just punishment
A memory has gone missing in its thousand strands of silver,
Fine-tuned to match the weight of my mother’s hand across the surface of every moment
The opal of her palms her white metal fingers cold and thin
Set the broken bones of truth
clatter out demands on keyboard
Grip the bars of a hospital bed.
These same hands with which she selected every shining seed
And strung them all together around the throat of a rising moon,
Joining the thumb and pointer finger together in attitude of blessing
As she clasps the story shut. Now
A dense forgetting rushes out in rivers of dark ink
Somewhere in the valley between my spine and breast,
pooling in the left chamber of an obsidian heart
cloven from the lithic core of grief.
A prayer shudders with earth pulse and unfurls itself in
Seismic longing, lapping at the veins with its forked tongue.
I have tasted the thermal map of memory
Here in between the crease of the dry autumn leaf and the damp rot of older seasons
Where I dig myself into time with one long fingernail.
But there is still this question I must ask:
Tell me, Saint Anthony, where did it go
The holy blood relic --
the handing down --
is it mine?
Author Bio:
Sonya was born as a bat in a golden cave in the Southwest. After dreaming herself into human, she saw that she has opposable thumbs, and has enjoyed using them to write, paint, and make messes. Her work has appeared in Latin American Literary Review, Cholla Needles, La Piccioletta Barca, and others.
RSS Feed