2 poems
On Exhalation
wildfire season, Sept 2020
1.
Feel of the dry iris:
six months since
someone crushed the breath out of you
2.
Rills of green bubbles
green glove-feel of the lakewater
breath jetting out
3.
Stars the sun’s size
fated to die
in ringblasts of radiant particulates
4.
The part of her that had already left you
breathing out impatient
pah in sleep
5.
When you sit
you feel the outbreath through the stitches
of old leather
6.
Pyrocumulus:
as laughter is a
sob backwards
fire makes
wind breathe
fire
To the 9 of Wands
Oct 31, 2020
Thoth Deck; “Strength” in Crowley’s cosmology
1.
Strength, don’t desert me ::
I’m slipping down the long arrowshaft, metal singing under fingers :: I’m held up just barely by
the sun tugging at my occiput ::
Brighten, white Samhain sun, I sing screamishly, even as you withdraw, buzzing with your
cohort of ghosts :: Moon, I go on, please don’t drown in the pool I carry in my abdomen ::
2.
Strength, don’t desert me ::
Feel that lean wolfy masculine moon setting in my belly
3.
Strength, don’t desert me ::
That feeling of holding your own erection in your hand :: without the feminine there is no
erection, no form to shape the power at the point where it lances sidewise through matter ::
So I’m getting up, yes, to brush my teeth, coming up with a few kind words, listening to the
maple leaves when they wetly brush me perchance ::
Nine arrowtips :: nine crescents, each cool as a shell-lip, white heatless flames sizzling across
metal
4.
Strength, don’t desert me ::
The sun does not illuminate but is illuminated :: without just a little immanence it’d smash right
through to the other side of the world and I’d crumple again :: the sun, unintubated, sleeps in the
city hospital’s dingy back rooms ::
As it is, I brush for just a second against the uncorroded solar surface, against the shining sun-
face of the compass rose ::
So I have the strength this week, just barely, to squeeze a pillow between my knees, strength to
shower :: strength to let the groan out :: I need so badly that strength that is the one-thing-more,
the 9, the addition you make only after achieving balance! ::
It’s true, I’m in pain :: I need so badly every energy in me to stir its opposite! ::
Strength, don’t go ::
Jay Aquinas Thompson is a poet, essayist, and teacher with recent or forthcoming work in Pacifica Literary Review, FIVES, Passages North, Jubilat, Tammy, COAST | NoCOAST, Full Stop, and Poetry Northwest, where they're a contributing editor. They're a Tin House Workshop alum and have been awarded grants and fellowships from the Community of Writers, the Sustainable Arts Foundation, and King County 4Culture. They live with their child in Washington state, where they teach creative writing to incarcerated women.