SQN - Sine Qua Non - Issue 1 - Journal - Page 121
SINE QUA NON
the night what kind of fields should we desire fields of fallen bodies of broken radios and
photographs adrift in redness of freshly turned soil and spades strewn
around in dusk’s dying light if perchance I wake up to my body in a desert buzzards circling
above my chest and a vulture interviewing my eye I will crawl
my dorsum leaving in the sand a trail which the wind like a deranged angel will swoop in to
erase the infernos on my palms and the thuribles on my knees left
in the canyon of forgetting I will seek me cacti is that not the closest thing to tenderness
there and then is tenderness not the picture frame of rage so that the
story doesn’t end with blood on the sand meat swaying from a beak or a liver re-growing
every dawn to become bird-food let it end with a blossoming
feet finding
dry land hands that keep turning into orioles breaking free from the cavern of grief as one
tempest of feathers fingers, beaks pulsing with song and let the blank
page be the naked tree of joy free of finch-nests, dagger-marks and leaves now strewn in
memory of grief that was hands, branches, hands, branches
melded as we begin the pious avocation of song-spawning the branches, then the hands
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