This selection, chosen by guest editor Sarah Clark, is from How to Keep Things Alive by Beth Gordon (Split Rock Press 2023).
Sonnets of Apology
i’m sorry for comparing you to new
rabbits for eight years
prints your undertow
a fluorescent ceiling light
for metamorphosis metaphors
swimming in the afterbirth
for drownings
i’m sorry for the colors
winter rabbit snow-
face flickering like
i’m sorry
worms
for tadpoles
for losing you in my dream
dolphin blue
voices far beyond the binoculars
where lightning is never seen without death
your eyes
a memory of memory
i’m sorry i’ve forgotten your human
fingers
for the DNA I gave you
the grey of empty hurricanes
forgive me
for losing you in my dream
voices runway lights
the weather lightning
for airport
guiding you beyond
fog that grounds all flight
i’m sorry i was wine drunk when you closed
your eyes when you hushed
to the ears of the grounded
the listings of superstitions
your cricket chatter
forgive me
simple
plagues hurricane gods heart attacks foreign
objects caught
where stars disappear where
your bloom
in the swallow of sorrow
stars disappear
a memory of memory
i’m sorry i’ve forgotten your tadpole
fingers
forgive me
the blue of sudden dragonflies
for the DNA I gave you
Beth Gordon is a poet, mother and grandmother in Asheville, NC. She is the author of Morning Walk with Dead Possum, Breakfast and Parallel Universe (Animal Heart Press), Particularly Dangerous Situation (Clare Songbirds Publishing), This Small Machine of Prayer (Kelsay Books), The Water Cycle (Variant Literature), How to Keep Things Alive (Split Rock Press), and Crone (Louisiana Literature). Beth is Managing Editor of Feral, and Assistant Editor of Animal Heart Press and Femme Salve Books.
Sarah Clark is a mad crip genderfuck two-spirit enrolled Nanticoke editor, writer, and cultural consultant. They are Editor-in-Chief of beestung, Editor-in-Chief and Poetry Editor at ANMLY, Editor-in-Chief at ALOCASIA: a journal of queer plant-based writing, Co-Editor of the Bettering American Poetry series, and a current Board member and Assistant Editor at Sundress Publications. They have edited folios for publications including the GLITTERBRAIN folio and a folio on Indigenous & Decolonial Futures & Futurisms at ANMLY. Sarah freelances, and has worked with a number of literary and arts publications and organizations, including the Best of the Net anthology, contemptorary, Curious Specimens, #PoetsResist at Glass Poetry, Apogee Journal, Blackbird, the Paris Review, and elsewhere.
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