LAURA SIMS

 

From POST–

 

 

I’m fuel

For felling I’m

 

Deadfall

 

In heaven

I’m plastic

Somehow

 

Where the melting sun

 

Only one time

In thousands

 

Makes of me

What swells

 

Then subsides

 

————

 

You were always a murmurous forest

But now you are

This

 

Incandescence

 

This slim

Conflagration

 

As long as

Your body

As brief as your body, it

 

Sputters

And gasps

 

Oil runs over the bones

 

————

 

Let the hot clean stones

 

Be a wilderness

Filter, let them clatter

Against cave walls

 

Drink blood

 

From the glacier, scooped out by hand

 

Let it quiet the mind

 

Let the quiet mind quiet the body and then

The quelled body

Disquiets the mind

 

————

 

                                                    The last ferry is

                                                    Drowning its riders

                                                    In dust and in

 

                                                    Space

                                                    Not meant for the dead

 

In the Winter Garden in the Winter Garden I wander the Winter Garden

                                      with you

 

Palm trees have risen

Again

And the last

Chandeliers

Suspend

 

————

 

Those are my molecules, stopping the tides

This

 

My mind

Returned

 

*

 

I like the hollow feeling on the far side of the moon

 

————

 

We chased from the school

A wolf and a she-wolf

 

Through deep forest aisles through

Opaque cones of smoke

 

*

 

We drew close to something then

We who don’t live

 

On this earth

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Laura Sims is the author of three books of poems: My god is this a man (forthcoming, Fence Books, 2013), Stranger (Fence Books, 2009), and Practice, Restraint, (winner of the 2005 Fence Books Alberta Prize), and of five chapbooks, including POST- (Goodmorning Menagerie, 2012). She has been a recipient of the Japan-US Friendship Commission’s Creative Artists Residency, and she is a co-editor of Instance Press with poets Elizabeth Robinson and Beth Anderson. She has written book reviews and essays for Evening Will Come, New England Review, Rain Taxi, Boston Review, and The Review of Contemporary Fiction. She teaches at NYU and lives in Brooklyn, New York with her husband and son. 

 

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