Drag Us There and I'll Call it Home

For the past few weeks, I've had these two poems open in tabs next to each other on my phone. Both have a menacing fairytale melancholy that I really enjoy.

 

Excerpt from Desire is a Federacy

 

...I’m thankful for those moments I wake up
    before you     if the police kill me I hope
the last thing I accomplished is making
    your coffee because I like how my hands feel
that early in the morning     incapable of harm
    miming tender acts of weather
instead like a lightning-struck senator
    the closest I’ve come
to participating in faith
    was believing that lightning strike
would help my neighbors sunrise
    sunflower sunset     this is a day if it looks like
all the ones before carrying us
    god knows where at least the dogwoods
will white and pink me perfect
    like arrows some men only really see
what they’re about to kill     leap high my love
    and know there’s not enough guilt
in ecclesiastes to demand the hungry
    attempt grace in their hunger
& what would a king blood-hemmed
    and sharp-sworded know
about starving     wanting the undaffodilled
    field the sad mechanics of legislation
can make     even out here with all our shirts
    on the clothesline and our mothers
up to their elbows in the washtub
    I’ve come with a petition
no one wants to sign like more
    swords in lilies thunderstorms
in every quiet dream you’ll have to wake
    up just to wring your hair out full
of the sweet rain smell     luminous
    as the lake I tend to deep in shadow
where swans dip their throats and come up
    dreaming     all the leaves giving in
to the wind at once     all the police dropping
    their handcuffs over the bridge
and for it raising the water ever so lightly
    we become light ourselves     I define
salvation as never having to explain debt
    to a toddler     drag us there and I’ll call
it home     drag us away from there and
    you’ve learned something about
this country the blue kings burning
    an acre they could own     I keep

their ash in my heart like an inheritance
    the urn of me     the downside of not being
a daisy patch is all the language I’m expected
    to remember like glimmer as in
the gun glimmers and inevitably as in
    I hope you’ll forgive me if I say I made a fool
of myself today inevitably
    I’ll say the same thing tomorrow

~ C.T. Salazar, Poetry Northwest 2023

 

Amsterdam, 11 April 2023

What They Love Now

The souls in my garden sing:

At noon, when light cracks through
Sea-salt to the sandy beds

And again, when midnight
Spreads the sky with stars in
A radiance that we,
Deep-water dwellers,
Can only feel
Under our skin, scales.

They sing of what they
Once loved:

            Princes, their voices
            Deep and resonant as
            Graves,

            The sun, glorious and raw—
            Burning on
            Flesh made for depths
            And darkness.

And what they love now:

            Currents that cool them,
            And ask politely for dances,

            Eels with eyes like coals and
            Temperaments like dogs,

            Their own harmonies,
            Tentative, swelling,
            Broken, brilliant by turns.

~ Sarah Cleto and Brittany Warner, Uncanny Magazine, 2023.