Heather Thomas, poems.

Esteban Moore, Heather Thomas, Craig Czury.

Sonar

Your sonar of loneliness

reaches farther than mine

Someone only needs to be in the next room

or on another floor

An actual angel in the play

may fade with time

You in the nothingness of night

with two oranges, a wall map

of the Atlantic sea floor

sunlight, twilight, midnight, trench

In the multi-night encountered

without you, I am someone else

Moon from a crevice, open terrace,

in the same room with blue globes

you’re thinking about nothing

and it’s very clear

the sound is a dream

we were pure but forgot

walking down years

my hands uplifted into yours.

Actionable Intelligence

There is actionable intelligence

in red-brick row houses,

spirit windows, no religion but love

burns on the fire escape.

There were wedding guests,

a singer in the tent,

infiltrators slipping borders,

blood diamonds all night.

Tirzah, you vanished

with the honey bee

in ruins open to air.

al-Ali, who knew your name?

Everything exists because

something else does.

I am a transient mannequin

wearing bright costumes

of vanity and oblivion

if happy nations have no history.

The Room of Not-Knowing


There’s a bed, a lamp, a bureau,
the drawer filled with your socks.
You keep the corners clear
for piles of laundry, magazines.
You sit at the desk hunting
what you don’t know in words
unspooling filigreed patterns
laced like nests across an inner sky.
When the nests fall
from the weight of their knots
you make new ones
or give up and construct a series
of shifting screens dark or light
depending on whether you
remembered to change the bulb.
Some have the translucence of pearls
or the wings of mating dragonflies.

Sleeping above you the skeleton

dangles your writing hand from its ear.

You come through rain

before everything strung and fallen,

brief as photos, your chance

to live at the heart of the real

and to tell. You are perturbed

by the pronunciation of your name.

Wallace Stevens House Prayer

323 North Fifth Street, Reading, Pennsylvnia, USA

In the walled space between

red brick rowhouses

heal us, Sandman

sliver of sky and a girl

of half-risen day

conjuring in the sandbox

under a dusty sun

these bricks where

cake, castle, catacomb

winding and unwinding

with the difficult rightness

of sand three stories down

the black iron fire escape:

Heal us, Sandman,

with the difficult rightness
of half-risen day,

these bricks where

the redness sticks fast.