This Connection is Not Private
She feels like she’s been struck
breathless
into a blue so intense
she can’t imagine any other color
She seems to be standing on a river
The sky is falling in a thousand tiny rainbows
salted with stars
She tells herself, it’s just a story:
Cinderella bootstraps
Overnight sensation
a story that repeats
over and over
in a meteor storm of falling stars
She feels like a star
maybe already falling
She tries to bring the stars inside
tries not to dissolve inside that storm
But she, too, is story
maybe just a story
just another story on the internet
Alone at Midnight: In a Field in the Rain
Lightning sparks a repeated prayer
against darkness. In the thunder,
she senses a path between centuries,
a narrow approach winding through shadows.
She feels a repeated blue presence
floating languidly.
Flickering starlight, seen only
in deepest darkness, is leaving traces
everywhere, is pulsing inside her:
a god’s strange silver feet
dancing across the sky,
dissolving what once was.
She feels ravenous, eating nothing,
overjoyed to be turned upside down,
enfolded into the sacred. Scarred,
but not scared. When asked about it later,
she doesn’t have to answer.
Her psyche is shaped differently now.
© 2024 Cynthia Linville
Cynthia Linville’s work has appeared in numerous poetry anthologies, and her two books of collected poems, The Lost Thing and Out of Reach, are available from Cold River Press. She served as Managing Editor of Convergence: an online journal of poetry and art for ten years and as Poetry Editor of Poetry Now for two years. She has received three mini-grants from Poets & Writers to perform in collaboration with musicians. Linville has taught in the English Department at Sacramento State University since 2000. You can see more of her work at CynthiaLinville.com.
No comments:
Post a Comment