6 poems
Air of Bone
Some labyrinths have no
way out—the sun’s amber
influence we are born into.
But the echo of a shivering hammer,
anvil and stirrup in my ear
comes from a fissure
of window, rima vocalis—
the cardinal points of
a horizon where
I am not center.
The calcium dust of the prayer
of St. Francis sift into the eggshells
of new birds—that red one
who will whistle through
the fluted glass chambers
of her inside-out heart,
unscrewing the lid
of a jar of fireflies
to name her own ghost.
You Don’t Have to Learn How
To Breathe, Cry and Swallow
For your own good, they say,
and you cry.
I love you, he says.
Swallow,
it will trickle down.
Try to breathe
with a hand over your mouth.
By their own bootstraps, they said,
while they work you to tears.
Believe me, he says,
and they swallow it.
They always say that the victim was armed.
I can’t breathe, he is what he says,
I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe.
You can cry and cry out
until you can’t cry anymore.
You’ll have to breathe through the holes—
because you have to be taught
how to die.
Essay on Luminiferous Either/
Or the Weight of Air
In those days we were ignorant.
In the silence of nothing warbling is incessant.
The ocean, we didn’t see. But predicted we’d roll off it in a delirium of adventure.
Science has yet to disprove the falling.
We swam with such meager effort we called it walking.
As if weightless—fifty-mile high jars balanced on our heads.
We thought they couldn’t spill. Hence the slapstick.
Unaware of on every centimeter of edge, the pressure;
the tiny curve of breath a body bends around itself,
a shawl of feathers shocked from a big white seabird.
Agate Lane
Necklace of verbs, springs
foreclosed house, of frost-
bit off summer:
fog house—the wasps, the irons,
and where I went missing.
I read her lips, don’t go,
or else, take me with you.
Her adamants, accelerants
follow me—
the flame that licks
up her heart.
The cloud I am rains.
Savings
I hold my mother’s teeth,
little parsnips,
with the gold crowns
she called her retirement.
I am afraid she will come for me
when I die. Meaning
there is no heaven, exactly.
Like always she’d tell me
she loves me and I’d say,
I love you, too, but this time
she’d believe it.
I remove the film
of her cigarette breath from
the car windows, bluish,
like the high clouds
of her cataracts.
As if . . .
The Sound of Glass
Spring peepers chirp at the scalloped
edge of floating
like new dandelions
predicting their futures.
Shrieking nails
—redwings call—
cueing each other
to wrench apart the woods.
The entire ocean hums in a congregate voice
at dawn and dusk migrations
and damselfish search the reefs
calling the names of their mates.
Nearing sixty, long into autumn
but past the winters, I think,
my entire span and degree
has been a dawn chorus
to you, dear Day,
Your diamonding—
Karen Holman works on a community mental health crisis team in Metro Detroit and serves as an associate editor of december magazine. Her chapbook, “Welcoming in the Starry Night of the Lightning Bees,” features in New Poets, Short Books, vol. IV. Her work appeared on NPR and in such publications as RHINO, Salamader, Puerto del Sol.