CLAIRE BOWMAN
from THUNDERHEAD
. . .
I push my fingers into the crevices
of volcanic rock
send messages to a better future
made of eights
eight
revolutions in misting exteriors (as in film)
once upon a time
I passed through rooms
touched
in prayer
like a piano
I wished to drop
like rain into a pool
ovoid moon harboring the lowest note
so rude
these were my efforts to stay alive
amidst plague years of a different kind
a kind of dreaming
that is, being small
smaller then than the branches that buoyed me,
a tapestry of indeterminate asteroidal wandering
I sometimes have conversations with the ghost
of my love’s love
hold hands with a book
little pulses shimmer through the room
like a nervous system and I am reminded of parties, how we
used to love scavenging the corners
for a past life
like decapods scavenging
the body
as it decomposes into ubiquity
air fluctuates like cells
travelling through a monastery
kitchen where radishes ferment, reviving
the wisdom of ancestors
what picture of solitude can you offer up
without stretching its membrane to a disaster of paleness
I miss the black hole of adolescence
that disappears like vision
into a pupil, the kind of void that sings
like bees in bells
the antediluvian moan
of quickly dying lava
what harmonies, entwined
like matted hair
unwilling to despair
I wander
among stones
find water
see shapes of the eventual
on the walls of closed eyes
like looking out
through the shell of a sunlit egg—
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*** ** ***
What’s looking back at you from inside your cup?
echoes of delusion & terror? a small wet likeness,
with scales that tell the future?
it’s easy to project your personal set of eels
onto the dark
but this is Pisces, reformed
sharp fingers grope toward us from the great obsidian pupil of Spring
Earth grieves inside our lungs
gray & questioning
drawn alone
I stoke fires &
mourn
no more adolescent desires, no touch
or tender moments strung like string beans at a fox’s wedding
I cry inside my mask
in the grocery aisle
make spontaneous puzzles
out of simple acts of being, harbor shock
like broth
steaming in an
earthen bowl
this month is for Spring cold
darkness
like plums, is for folding sheets in half light
often, I make tea & argue
with chipped dishes
they seem to bend in my hands along
the slow soapy pull
of the planet’s longing
like light
slides around
the optic disc, then refracts,
bearing messages from the burning ash
both of my brains can smell—
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*** ** ***
Eating a handful of snow
in the garden that goes down
rock steps
placed by rough hands into the ground along an invisible line,
a fault
a sudden collapse
where bleeding hearts
used to grow
who is that screaming in the waterlogged wood
of the fire, whose mouth is propagating froth, seething in the smolder of locust limbs?
even piano keys
bow in reverence to humidity, house a heavy
boat that glides through northern nights,
nights a kind of window we look out from
into a bitchy world
suffocation
burgeon of flower, spore,
virus
car on fire
alarm fills the sweet hot air hung like laundry
(snow was a dream
drifting down, like my skin, a sparkle of nightmare)
in the sublime, I dig my way back into that decade when
even the mice were sweeter
hidden like gems in our folded clothes
lifetime of basement
tornado sirens then summer berries studding
the edge of woods
who knew we’d bury so much
even the tastes can you imagine
lifted from the tongue
nestled in with bones
in the garden, ex-voto bulbs, garden
I lie down in
to watch
the house collapsing
like an old body, water spots disembowel the ceiling, momma’s porch caved in
no appetite left
for shadows
plutonic remembrance in lavender fugue
what remains
but the Holy Ghost?
will you hold me now? now that I’ve remembered
at least 3 things about the way
we used to love snow?
will you feel my heart and tell me if
it’s beating too far
away from you?
we were poor; we slept late;
then wandered; forgot
the way out; of ourselves—
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*** ** ***
Beloved, you rock in Cassiopeia’s chair
in a moment lingering like plasma
the buffalo know how a revolution moves
through us seemingly endless cloud
of conscious thought like candle smoke like
how the bottom of a breath gurgles, after all
these years, they say the affliction may never leave
your body, beloved I am lighting candles for you
on the mountain, & the Reaper is sitting in my lap
curling his tail, & what is melting—it is everything,
hot, descending the leg of a table rotating
in space, a lie, a pack of them, claiming invincibility
as Jupiter comes into view, there is nothing simple
about the way the eye perceives a panorama
of horror, the buffalo know, vast plains
horripilate & the eye burns out—
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*** ** ***
Though the loosely bound pages of time seek
to describe our distance, you are here
with me now
slung under the arm
of the great stone giant who navigates fate
counting every step you’re taken away from home
where heaps of fabric lie
collecting fungi in the basement
home
where you smoke a cigarette & hang
your body out the upstairs window
listening to owls
& the drug dealer doing donuts on the lawn next door
in a red truck
like a spell against death
good lord
these greasy days
my mind
in anthills
cymbals strike I fold the taste of falling into
into the batter
& though I approach the altar
with hope
& a desire to be loved
I receive only smoke
burning oil paintings
& sympathy comes only from the leaves
in my teacup a vessel
transporting the unwritten syllabi of skeletons
& all along
the dark corridors of my year,
I trace your name into the stone
our blood leaps, uncounted
faces of fire
silhouettes shift like memories beyond panes of stained glass,
the shattered fragments of blue and yellow I receive
though I hesitate
standing like a dark ghost
in the doorway
of the study where
god does his hazardous darning—
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*** ** ***
Yes to the notion of sleeping through live birth,
no to the coward’s trail of lighter fluid.
yes to a country of only children,
no to eating grubworms & moss.
yes to spirit,
no to god.
yes to fluttering like a ribbon of incandescence through saline eternities,
no to turtle soup.
yes to paintings with more dismemberment,
no to colonial pride.
no to bunkbeds,
yes to ladders up trees near the abandonment well.
yes yes to eating fire
but never say yes when I plead.
only yes when unintended shades of apricot
bellow softly in a field of helium ringlets on the page,
only yes as we grope for our missing wings.
no to abstract guilt.
yes, please cover my grave in peonies
but rename them,
yes to dead grandmothers who are perfect because we never met them
who will forever remember our faces,
yes, thunder.
yes, cerebellum.
yes, sorrow.
yes, solace.
yes, our remainder,
but without us.
without what is gagged, without secret or sacrifice,
without a key—
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CLAIRE BOWMAN
Claire Bowman is the author of a chapbook titled Dear Creatures (Sutra Press, 2017). She holds an MFA from the Michener Center for Writers, and her work can be found in Black Warrior Review, Narrative Magazine, and The Volta, among other places. Claire works as the Senior Editor at Host Publications, where she also produces a literary podcast called The Host Dispatch. She moonlights as a tarot reader and teacher with Typewriter Tarot in Austin. Follow her on instagram @clairethepoet.
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A Dozen Nothing 