Cleave
(a collaborative poem with Simone Muench on a line by Pablo Neruda
Two immense blackbirds, two cannons:
too many things in twos split by a dark thick
filmstrip: cleave between body and screen.
A life writ with feathers, with gunpowder
that fizzles or explodes sending scattershot
into phoenix. We myth-make beak into beam:
a black seam up a burlesque dancer’s leg:
a powder keg’s jazzed choreography.
Was it blackbird or mesh stocking? Church
canon or copulation fainting into blur?
We rapunzel a raven-haired braid
down a cathedral. Cabernet our way
not home but toward an ideal highway
though it’s just another dividing line
another two-lane blacktop spined together
in painted vertebrae. We cage the bird, cut
the hand to fodder. We arrive
halfway which means we never arrive.
Published in NELLE and winner of their Three Sisters Award: https://www.uab.edu/cas/englishpublications/nelle/latest
