With last year’s lovers still freshly shed,
An impossible golden summer tumbles
toward us through the black water,
rolling out carpets of blistering song

Rainbow trout leap like angels
And the cannon of memory
Brings war upon what we have known

I can’t save every sailor,
for they leap to their deaths
when I look away

But I can hold down the stars
and let you escape, under cover
of the never-ending day

is wasted on eyes lost to an airlock,
space deep black.

organs
sit in the dark envelope of skin,
the urgency of the body a crudeness.

a young girl is glued down, stuck with pins
and watched. ten mouths
move. thirty shells clatter

and blow the lid from a pot.
resin down a throat
captures time:


in Belgium the dancers wear burlap bandages
to the ballroom. waltz
until life begins to seep

from their ankles. the young girl, carried home
in sheets of copper. a wound
is rolled in soot and silt

and boxes of Valentine chocolate
sit stacked on a bedside table.
fingers scream down the back


and up the arms
and here a girl is still
trapped under thick cherry sound-waves.

the city in the ceiling will pull any old body
out into the harsh sky
through heaven’s vein,
and call it, “the one who still loves you.”

Devotion

Riverine

by Adriana Erickson