Come. Wander with me awhile among the ruins. which reminds me of a dream, our future: bills were due and I was adding up rough chisel in one hand you had just come in carrying a bag I couldn’t help but wonder have you seen the notes I’ve been leaving? and one on the fridge the sky was the Form of Blue that afternoon so cool-toned and mingled together I wondered and if these things could mix so easily peel apart the layers and make right I enumerate the sunlight Phoebus Apollo breaks apart crow-meetings just after sunrise, carrying a dim star in their beaks, meet me by the broken swings, I have an unfortunate streak of stubbornness all pith and no juice, they’ll say the crows left us entangled messages the tethers of our old life glowing uniform cords of sunlight have you seen the new colors growing in the sky? and a set of pocket-universes last night I looked up from my book in our blue bedspread aloft through open windows and out of the corner of my eye like unset paint, the starlight still I’m beginning to wonder every wonder and weight we accumulate debris turn words into food collapse inward everything is coming up all at once, so fast, all the chain reactions you’ve caused I can hardly record every permutation bound beyond boundary waters come into the house once you’ve finished you’ve gotten too much sun already soon there’ll be tiny white shreds bathed in orange and goldenrod where the in-between-spaces are prickly I guess all that gravity and we’ll have nothing to do until we reach the last boundary but I suppose from your vantage point please don’t wait for me, because in the end we’ll become our orbits will decay, and here we’ll continue to fall Benjamin Renné teaches writing and literature in Northern Virginia. His poems seek the soft places in between reality, where you feel at once both inside and outside, perched on a threshold—the breath before rain, or the cut of purple sky at dusk. His manuscript, Fragments of a Solar Phenomenon, was a finalist for the 2023 Four Way Books Levis Prize in Poetry. He earned his MFA in Creative Writing from George Mason University and his poetry has appeared in Juked, Prelude, Cleaver, Ghost Proposal, and more. Image: wikpedia.org Check out HFR’s book catalog, publicity list, submission manager, and buy merch from our Spring store. Follow us on Instagram and YouTube. Disclosure: HFR is an affiliate of Bookshop.org and we will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase. Sales from Bookshop.org help support independent bookstores and small presses.
—Samuel R. Delany, Trouble on Triton
expenses on stone tablets
calculator in the other
of groceries, chalk full of sunlight and chickpeas
at your face, the sun
still stuck in your hair
there’s one on the counter beside the bananas
and one beside the microwave
you wouldn’t believe it, ocean-hewed
what was sea and what was air
how would I get them undone again?
their orientation in the sky?
and hold you close, brittle as day
like shards of glass in my hand
I know you’ve seen them too
feathers burnt ripe charcoal
bring something shiny
when it comes to the end of the world
all meat and no water
all sun and no substance
of shoe-strings and bright fire
crossed and entangled
with the tethers of our new one
fragments of debris lodged between us
there’s solitude between our hands
hung like trinkets from our necks
and you were gone, a crater
where once your body lay
midnight peeked into the room
I could see your shadow, dripping
brighter than my own reflection
if it’s worth making note of it all
every dim catalog of flower and leaf
every aching orbit
become photosynthetic
break down sugars
in our bloodstream
with our own weight
become unearthly // untenable
I haven’t even had time to count
just by being in this timeline
of light emitted by your body
we find the thresholds of our choices,
how each orbit brings us closer to zero
picking up those fragments
I can see your arms beginning to flake
of you littered across the yard
you’ll gaze down at me, as if
from a vast distance
and only momentum keeps us going
will release us eventually
but tumble relentlessly downward
and all time will stop for me
I will still be falling
don’t wait long for my body
to curve endlessly toward zero
asymptotic of each other, two lines
moving together toward infinity
in the night of space, illuminated
by our own fragile glowing forms
toward that solar phenomenon
Heavy Feather Review 