she wants to stretch
just a little past body.
the old religious did it
with mortification
fasting and no sleep,
praying for days
awaiting illumination,
their substance
translucent
ecstatic, the divine
translated the way sun
flows through a window
where flesh is the glass
all we see is that light
not what allows it to pass
through it, through
states of permeability
beyond silence and celibacy,
past prayer
into hunger & pain
simply to open
that mystic core
wow–loving this.
Where have you gone so soon, friend?
Have your eyes burnt out like stars for the dawn?
We once laughed, drank, talked about
Eliot and his cats, Hemingway’s fascination with the phallus.
Now you’ve disappeared like the wind
On one of those warm summer nights
That seems to have sidled out of time.
When you return, will you remember
The dreams you carried like nitroglycerine?
Be what you were. Dance to a song not yet composed,
Moving for the sake of moving,
But not for the sake of movement.
No, friend, that’s where you differ.
Samuel Hovda is an undergraduate at Winona State University studying Literature and Creative Writing. He has been published in Poetry Quarterly, Midwest Literary Magazine, and the bad futurist. He was a finalist for the 2011 Rebecca Lard Award for Poetry.
this is no time for tenderness, for blooming.
seventeen days before the sun’s center rays
brush the equator on its movement south
we open eyes to paler light, morning mist
& the first sight of exhaled breath since spring
in a thin threat foreshadowing equinox
despite the afternoon heat. already
some trees surrender before the autumnal point,
shedding leaves in their haste to embrace
cooler, quieter nights. There is weight
but also beauty in that breaking down
& giving up, leaves dropping in sighs
in that first riot of color crisping to brown
after collecting in flamed layers
to crackle under feet
bringing to mind those wicker men
but lacking smoke & sacrifice–heatless hunger
uncovering the branched, brittle bones
of trees; skeletal fingers stretching to scrape sky
as if to grasp and hold tightly
something elusive as change
between morning sun
and setting moon
one paraglider
hangs suspended
in all that blueness
our home galaxy–
just this one holds every star
I number tonight
if bodies could flow to where minds fly
I would learn weightlessness on the moon
or perhaps string stars in a burning thread,
not needing breath & laughing
at magnitude and gravity
as if absolute things mean anything
in this madness. in smaller scale
I would gasp at the secret symmetry
glowing in a pinch of sand; bivalve shells
jumbled intimately with quartz
in this flight of mind
where I have asked distance to collapse on itself
as if counted with imaginary numbers
I would find you, perhaps
a variable nested inside all this improbability
Susan Daniels Poetry 