Two Poems

Alyssa Jewell

Incantation Under a Streetlight

 
 
If you look for peace in the trembling anger
of bodies shaking down to their mouse cores, hungry
for summer to weed over the open fields,
 
you may find it blank,
 
cold like the clay arms
of bewildered embraces: snowfall underneath a chattering
streetlight, the quick, unspoken departures
sifting down through Decembers of overdoses,
Decembers of worry.
 
You can scream, too,
for the angels to descend, to reassure you,
for nothing is impossible,
though you may find yourself in the quiet,
slushing through a mess of stars,
a swarm of bees smoked down in a hive.
 
 
 

July Night

 
I proved my emptiness when I lifted the cast iron skillet from the flame

              so it could burn no one,

plunged broken glass bottles

                             on Sunday mornings

                                                                into the drain

                                                                                     so only the hillsides could bruise brown and blue

                                    and host those flecks of glinted green, paper wrappers peeled

                                                                           in sticky ribbons of ivory and metallic, every small reflection.

We learn to push away chaos,

              and if lucky, we master the walk, balance the rusted wheel spokes

                                                                                   that bend the line between grace and doormat.

How does one speak to the fire-hearts we meet along those tilted rays—

                            how does one cool them, pluck them

                                                                                                  from their deadweight branches?

                                                                      Do we spit on them, then shine them back up?

I wanted to pull forgiveness from the caverns between my ribs

                                        as if it were connective tissue, there all along

                                                         but it seemed a short search gone on too long, and I was tired of trying.
 
So I speak today instead, unapologetically, about the fast rain

                                                                                                   pitting my roof and all it does

for my sleep, how in the middle of the night, when my throat has gone up in smoke,

                             dry from too much salt and flu, I open my window

                                                                                                  and open my mouth: no screens, no barriers—

just drops sprung loose from the blue earth lulling me out of fever—

                                                                             a cure I could not count on,

                                                                                                                              come out of the black.

ALYSSA JEWELL recently served as Green Rose Prize editor for New Issues Poetry and Prose, and she coordinates the Poets in Print reading series for the Kalamazoo Book Arts Center. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Best New Poets, Colorado Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Lake Effect, North American Review, Quarterly West, and Sugar House Review, among other publications. She lives and teaches in Grand Rapids, Michigan.