January - Poem 31
Cento to Melt Ice / Composed by Haley Bosse
with lines drawn by and from Tess Adams, Haley Bosse, Jess Bowe, Joanna Lee, Thomas Page, Sarah Paley, and Amy Snodgrass.
While everyone waits for the storm to come,
to hush and quiet. we live
the looming fabric waving
the past uncovers.
a line of police cruisers, sirens mute in the before-dawn
Look, the moon said,
A whistle breaking open
This is where we begin, in the mud with the red–
first note carried through the tunnel
like blood like blood like blood
marking lines of ruin across the map.
They are coming. The signal fires are lit.
and, yes, words
against such relentless
boots?
language to speak the loss that has hollowed me out.
The roar of the engine is a dare.
And for love that is stronger than death.
–it is almost within arm’s reach
My heart too – on a leash that I seldom remember to slacken.
An ungovernable force all my own.
It ebbs and flows like the tide full of red blooms and seaweed clouds.
before the world realizes you’re not dead and buried
today, you are still
much too small and alive.
I am not sure I can survive your brightest now.
The crackCRACK
of oversaturated tree trunks
every bucket of midnight
the laying on of their hands.
A cloud circles in and circles out. It drops then spreads.
what do you call that then?
to carry love down the sidewalk,
a song unafraid of its fear.
over a river running black and unpersuadable
over dark cars and dark asphalt
out of my skin, unbloomed.
and you reach your hand
to the human next to you,
stretched like a kitestring as the wind
who dared to venture out into the clear day—
over the windows like eyes and eyes and eyes
to the middle. come walk with me
I am stuck in every tonight
and people are singing somewhere
a hope escaping
the water never
falling still
for those who stay to dare, waiting in the rain.
finally, I become
a tiny cloud
Your life is as valuable as mine. Your life is as valuable as mine. Your life.
Its roots stretching
to guts, to muscle, to skin, quicker than you can blink
// the undulating sidewalk // full of cracks // and fissures //
Our lungs so like ocean
waterways of a dream;
sound waves swallowing
The scrape of your calluses on broken concrete,
trying to navigate // to any public place // under heaven
they cannot hear the song I sang. I sung.
That will not be washed away
today I fall with its grit.
reborn into the air
and I gasp
The worms surfacing from puddles,
i imagine i’m as common as the wind, as ordinary as any leaf left for winter’s bed.
Greenbright between their veins
a surgeon’s neat crosshatch
and feet to kiss the cold of the ground
Involuntary traveler, there is no cure for memory.
what we mean: we were, we are, so lost, so lucky, so lucky, so lost.
cold hands reaching for cold stars
a brighter ending, or less clouded eyes
