Note: Due to website limitations, poem line breaks will not be right on all screens, particularly narrow ones. To see the poet’s intended version, please click the Print Friendly button. Or try turning your phone or tablet to landscape orientation.
(an excerpt)
By Danielle Vogel
Recorded by author
…………………………..this breath
horizon
life
offered
my hands
my own face
the eye
of a rose, a rock
to be fields of
I will submit
the heart, the voice,
entrained
and like a single word is only
world with an l
removed, so are we
the same
as this sound,
only we’ve taken something on
that’s confused things
remember
cross the celestial equator of this sentence
northward : at the teeth of the equinox
the tropic of the tongue, contorted
a coven of milk thistle
a rippling of seeds, sown belly to belly
a bright feathering : helix of osprey’s wing
belts of cinnamon ferns and dandelion pods
celandine, sliced
thick ribbon of vulvae blood, zipped into the voice
skin book, synaptic to the mouth
bury me in the fetal position
slip my body in oils
a circlet of shells / rosehips, splitting
vigil me with red ochre
wrap the thigh bones in
carve me at the open mouth
of a cave . fractal horn
and flasked moon
derange the fabric of the I — little epic, rippled into a delirious unhemming
then, hatch me from little boxes
of sound : each mouth
a lady slipper : the raw material of glaciers : the hull
a swarming, midwifes the dead
all this after the last hoar frosts
mongrel voiced : a hymnal
of light / of vegetation
I see wood anemone
whorled aster
lobelia : loosestrife
purple boneset
ghost pipe
beebalm and lace
water snakes
cattail and coneflower
coronas of primrose, bittersweet
nightshade
and the moon, sown in
Another version of this poem was previously published in La Vague. Reprinted with permission. © Danielle Vogel
Danielle Vogel is a poet, lyric essayist, and interdisciplinary artist working at the intersections of queer ecology, somatics, and ceremony. She is the author of four hybrid poetry collections, including Edges & Fray and a triptych of poetic texts: Between Grammars, The Way a Line Hallucinates Its Own Linearity, and A Library of Light (forthcoming 2024). Vogel is an associate professor at Wesleyan University, where she teaches workshops in innovative poetics, memory and memoir, and composing across the arts.