Runner Up: 2023 Sandy Crimmins Poetry Contest
1.
To navigate the tenacity of the dark
do I wave an ochre pistil?
Smuggle some fertile beauty
recklessly into my terror?
When through a marrow-streaked window
a wren digs her grave in the breast of another wren
what wound do I alleviate?
Who do I elevate?
What crown do I forego?
An astonishment
of ordinary animal.
Every animal
a letter
to every other animal.
2.
time watches from the doorframe time removes her rings one by one before sliding between satin sheets time a mosaic of discarded catbones and splinters the body has absorbed time with her breast out forehead on the cold counter shudders haloes into our chest cavities: an astronomy
3.
Consider the simultaneous:
inheritance a cluster
of stunned ghosts
trailing
from vow to vow.
Confused detectives.
Wet edamame pinched out
from skin pockets
clutching survivors
how rubble clenches
the neckskin
of collateral damage
motherhungry
and bewildered at the breach.
4.
Consider the simultaneous:
giddy infant
farting in her father’s arms,
laughter’s unruly persuasion.
And behind a gas station the knuckle
bone of an adolescent girl
rots till it sprouts milk
weed.
No slight surge of moths no cartoon lunchbox
no breeze.
There is no leaving
the body.
5.
Animal what crown?
Animal what red?
What hand
where even conquest
in its wreath
spills onto its pink back?
6.
The ebony mountain is a heart.
The bird, propelled, a heart.
We measure the heart with a fist.
Astonished I studied my fist
eight years old
awed by the legibility
of my secrets.
Shabnam Piryaei is a poet, filmmaker and artist. She is the founder and curator of the online art and interview journal MUSEUM. You can read more about her work at https://shabnampiryaei.com/.