Star
Shining to get to the trees.
Of light, of exact evening.
A crescent whistles, scissors
in a narrow path. A long transit
passes at night plucking
at its verges. Who goes there?
Who? Who gets to seam inside
with its out?
A white lily like a talisman. Its light.
Planted a little, partly
black or walled—or buried. Just
not there in the dark, disappeared.
As if bronze, its evil magic cuts clear
while falling, its petals, not stars.
Blueprint to Thrive
You thrive best when all
know candors better than
their ancestry, proclaim
goodnesses received—
what heaves truths
forward despite
inclines and declines.
Declensions offer the war-hungry
root of capital, yes disturbance,
yes identity politicizes everything
at certain brinks that pretend no blame.
It’s a clouded picture not because
vague or abstract tho’ layered
with falsehood and fact. To perforate
the veils you need to slip outside
and step back 100 meters or so.
Look back, see how small the image
presents now. Take that in as how
you’ll hold its truths in mind. Further,
imprint its non-importance to your being.
Here in the city of place I nurture
and am nurtured—a causal root
whose greenest scroll proceeds
unblaming, no chasing arrows
to confuse us into blamelessness.
Laurie Price is a poet and visual artist, who was in the first graduating class at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in 1981. Her third full-length poetry collection was published with Spuyten Duyvil Press, 2024, titled These Pages Once Were Skin. In 1993 she received a seminal life-changing poetry grant from the Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation in San Francisco, California (administered by Intersection for the Arts), which kicked off her life as a citizen of the world. Author of two previous collections, Except for Memory (Pantograph Press, 1993) and Radio at Night: Recent and Selected Work (Lunar Chandelier Press, 2013), and four chapbooks, she has lived and worked in Mexico, New York City, Morocco, Spain, and, as of 2013, lives and works (again) in Oaxaca, Mexico.
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Heavy Feather Review 