After Crying, I Remember that Each Day Comes with a Sunset
Praise the world in calligraphy
not in the janky pen that leaked
the sky out into your pocket
or the pencil you’ve sharpened
down to the eraser. Praise the world
with thick eyebrows, an afternoon
shadow, the twist of a hip.
Praise the world with the short way home,
not the long way you sometimes take
so you don’t drive by your ex’s house.
Love and sorrow are just road signs
you can choose to follow. Or not.
Like how to be calm when chaos is a world
you can’t spell. Praise the world
for its multiple syllables,
its made-upness, like fuckididity,
how we live with fancy coffeeshops
where we can’t order a drink in less
than five words. Praise the clouds
when they emerge as a painting where light
touches everything and hunger is an endless
sugar spoon we devour in the snow-covered
mountains because everything is glistening.
Praise what we want to swallow like what is
burning on the horizon, the deep orange,
but we are happy enough to leave it whole.
Reaching up I pulled the bedsheets from the clouds
because the sky has what it takes
to become a saint
a few miracles, a random meteor
landing on a mailbox,
and the travel bag I left in the living room,
don’t open it
unless you want to see what I’m bringing
to the apocalypse—
a pink gun, several tornados I call breath,
a summer of tears—and
how did you read that? Tears or tears?
It’s hard when our words
can be what drips from our eyes
or what is ripped open
when a man wants inside us.
Because I’m a magical book
there are places he can’t cut or fold.
He’ll never dog-ear me,
even those years I fell unexpectedly
into the wheat fields, I’ve memorized
the times I’ve felt safe—five. And all the years
the dark circled, what can I say?
I wrote about light, it’s not loneliness
to say I’d rather walk into the sunset
with my own shadow,
I’d rather turn my own page.
Star-Craving Mad
We’ve spent too much timber
considering constructions, spinning planets
on sticklers and hoping they don’t crash.
Call us craycray. Call us the nightclub
of non compos mentis.
This crayon universe of melted wealth.
This moonbeam mushrooming
with astronomical objections.
It’s 9 pm local Mars time and I’m aching for stars
and starlets, for an angel with shimmering nightcaps.
Desire is a dartboard we aim for, but tonight
let’s serve lunacy, lunar ecology, lunch
on a dark bread with glitter and flask.
This wonderland of a darkroom.
This wormhole of bedlam and bonkers.
How did we end up moonstruck, star-craving mad?
A locket of Venus between our clavicles.
A universe in the hollow of our bones.
Kelli Russell Agodon’s fourth collection of poems, Dialogues with Rising Tides was recently published by Copper Canyon Press. She’s the cofounder of Two Sylvias Press and serves on the poetry faculty at the Rainier Writing Workshop, a low-residency MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University. www.agodon.com
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