The Sturgeon Moon

Widened, a white pupil
over the yard, as my grandmother
hung rattlesnake skins.

Her fingertips labored
within the quiet grammar of ceremony.

I keep in mind the scent first:
drying pepper, faint venom,
the sap-sweet musk of cedar;

a mix that lived in her garments
and adopted her by means of the home.

Typically she hummed,
barely audible.
Typically she labored in silence,

the sort that makes you look inward
for a spot to place your eyes.

And beneath that broad-mouthed moon,
I started to see:
These weren’t duties,

however continuances.
I stand behind her,

barefoot on cool planks,
feeling the evening
attain its lengthy fingers

between us.
She doesn’t flip,

however I do know she senses me
the best way a tree is aware of a bird
has landed in its crown.

When morning lastly comes—
skinny, ash-coloured,

mushy with the promise of warmth,
she gathers what has dried sufficient
to carry its form

and leaves the remaining
for an additional moon.

I’m constructed on unanswered issues

The carapace,
the echo of bone studying its goal,
the lengthy solitude of a creature
that carries its home like a wound.

They are saying all vertebrate embryos
start the identical. But, solely mine
lets the shoulder blades wander,
sliding inward like hesitant rivers
earlier than the ribs bend and fold—
hardening right into a wall
of absence, of restraint.

For years, I assumed it was a shell.

Solely later did I perceive
it’s the unfavourable area,
the hole the bones refused to fill,
that stored me alive.

Why the physique waits so lengthy
to be taught its personal design—

I can’t reply.
I used to be made for enduring, not explaining.

The whole lot I do know comes from strain:
the deep, unlit hours when water
appears like origin,
and the world above is merely hearsay.

I hear it
as a kindred factor, an outdated riddle
shifting by means of the ocean’s backbone,
looking for a listener.

A affected person creature, I proceed
in sluggish armour of questions,
swimming the seam
between what the body reveals
and what it refuses to say.

The shell isn’t mine alone:
It’s formed by absence,
by what won’t change into flesh.

I’m constructed for endurance,
for an unrecorded life,
for the quiet economies of survival.

Each motion a negotiation,
a testomony
that nothing mushy
ever vanishes solely.

That Morning in Athens

Candy olive ghosts in,
barely a scent;
only a suggestion,
a heat, narcotic vapor.

Feral and unguarded,
unmasked, startled
by our starvation, held
within the amber resin of now.

By some means your skeletal
denim loosens, drops
to the floorboards, and
we flip wholly to pillows,

dealing with one another like
two ravenous jackals
monitoring the moon’s
blue cartilage. Pleasure—clear,

sudden—flares by means of us,
a vibrant, ragged surge
shifting by means of the physique:
animal, involuntary,

a sound we can’t cease,
a spot the place every little thing
is feasible, the place nothing
has but been named. And so
we make love once more,

as if the world had
fallen to embers,

as if it had been solely
a small shelter rising
at midnight, constructed
second by second.

«RELATED READ» POEMS BY CAROLYN CHILTON CASAS: Essential Language, Metaphorically Speaking and more»

---

picture: Stine86Engel