Two Poems by Gretchen Rockwell
/the properties of iron, and how elements
hiss and bubble when combined. Carefully,
she eats to balance her excess
yellow bile while she pores over
the philosophy of the body.
Read Morethe properties of iron, and how elements
hiss and bubble when combined. Carefully,
she eats to balance her excess
yellow bile while she pores over
the philosophy of the body.
Read MoreHis wrinkled eyes
Were the rumpled maps
Of third world countries
No longer in existence
Enlightened, as in Paul’s famous letter.
Freed from optical immediacy
To hold my son is to hold my father,
the clasp a chance to grieve again.
No one hears a beetle braving the distance
between two fading initials. All they hear is a bird
they can’t describe.
Read More-How whenever you annoyed me, I used to pantomime taking off my ring and throwing it into an
imaginary body of water, and how it always made you laugh
Still, you worried what the shell might say
about me when visitors held it to their ears.
If I had been a boy they would have named me Jonah. Which means dove. But all I think of is the would-be-prophet who got swallowed by a whale for trying to run from God.
Read MoreI can jump through a hoop,
but I’m no killer whale.
You’ve always been embarrassed by
The bare dirt patches
For which summer
Isn’t entirely to blame
Though you shouldn’t be
Hannah, you are somewhere now. Tucked around the landscape
like a fitted sheet around a bed.
The man with me dips the oar,
drags it through the liquid silver
as gently as wetting a paintbrush.
there are no apples here
only thorns and her wood
is her own and she’s just
fine exactly where she
is
How many more days
before the sunrise? How many more days before the sun
dies? Every potted plant whispers your undoing.
Each sun has tried to outdo
The other in brightness.
Each has staked out
It’s time in the sky
I stood in the barn with its rafters dusty & leather & watched the horses outside
rooted in their pastures. If their hooves could grow deep into earth,
perhaps they would become trees.
“he loves ball-point pens
because he can write in blue.
he mutters gospel gospel gospel gospel
& I never bother to ask what he means.”
Read More“as if having the knowledge of walls
was enough to pull out the pigments that characterizes
the will to live. they think that’s why van gogh drank paint.”