Eromancy

           divination by means of the air

O inevitable architect, in your false prime the last of your images blew off in a breeze of
sawdust & chalk. At the fair, I stole a pinhole photograph of the moon. I carried apple
blossoms floating over a black lake in my coat pocket. Your name, I ingested. Now light
empties over waves imitating driftwood, a dry weight, counterbalance to what love
abandons. The thought of blood in my arteries remains an illogic warmth. I remember the
earnest, but now uncertain, affections. The night tilts. Silver tokens, perhaps stars. I stand
among the living reading your initials. White ink tattooed on water.

—

This selection comes from Maureen Alsop’s book of poetry Mantic, available from Augury Books. Purchase your copy here!

Maureen Alsop, Ph.D. is the author of several poetry collections including Appartion Wren, Mantic, Later, Knives & Trees, and Mirror Inside Coffin (forthcoming). www.maureenalsop.com

Marika von Zellen has a BA in English and Creative Writing from Cornell College (no, not the one in Ithaca). She’s had poetry and fiction published in Open Field, Temporary Infinity, The Grin City Monthly, and the anthology Rock & Roll Saved My Soul. As an Editorial Assistant for Sundress, she’s copy-edited the book Picture Dictionary (2014); as a freelance editor she copy-edited the photography book Face It (2013). In the summer of 2012, she attended the Grin City Collective Artist Residency in Iowa. Besides writing, she enjoys theoretical physics, playing piano, ghost-hunting, climbing trees, and drinking good Czech beer. She’s also a scholar of Lewis Carroll.

Thumomancy

           divination  by means of one’s own soul

I would not notice your faint intrusion, but for the vignette edge
of the landscape, where your face
is an accident without origin.

I see you have been here all along. Let me tell you things
can happen in the years. Last winter a squirrel
died in the cabin
chimney. There is no

single script. Only the last three orders
of breath made before silence. Night has
given me my wide addiction. Under
uncertain laws, in the sleep of no choice, I follow
motivations downward into the sweep

of your pen. Scrawled lights of a new city
wink between rows of tamarisk. The center
of the book is a catastrophe, but
with love there is a lack

of distance. You have led me into the first
threshold of your vision. Jupiter
glows through a ragweed thicket. There is no
body. No sound. You go on without
calculation for the beginning. You go on

under the lowering
of gravity. Most

recent of animals, your lost papers fill
the closet. All afternoon you
constructed snow angels, turning your palms
skyward, but the gesture
of your hands were not holy. Tonight the oncoming
boxcar whistles your unfolding.

—

This selection comes from Maureen Alsop’s book of poetry Mantic, available from Augury Books. Purchase your copy here!

Maureen Alsop, Ph.D. is the author of several poetry collections including Appartion Wren, Mantic, Later, Knives & Trees, and Mirror Inside Coffin (forthcoming). www.maureenalsop.com

Marika von Zellen has a BA in English and Creative Writing from Cornell College (no, not the one in Ithaca). She’s had poetry and fiction published in Open Field, Temporary Infinity, The Grin City Monthly, and the anthology Rock & Roll Saved My Soul. As an Editorial Assistant for Sundress, she’s copy-edited the book Picture Dictionary (2014); as a freelance editor she copy-edited the photography book Face It (2013). In the summer of 2012, she attended the Grin City Collective Artist Residency in Iowa. Besides writing, she enjoys theoretical physics, playing piano, ghost-hunting, climbing trees, and drinking good Czech beer. She’s also a scholar of Lewis Carroll.

Dendromancy, Ex Nihilo Nihil Fit

            divination by means of leaves and branches of oak

A lark-blue wakeling is the furnace’s doctrine of visible richness. It is that
which I fear when the ceiling bears down. My mind’s

withholding is motion alone

like the whole shadow of a blown star. I have reread my love
times and times, the purple tendering, a weird brilliance
beyond the driveway’s flowering iris. I suppose

it’s where the body’s warmth is kept. At least
through the flare of one empire’s duration. When the last border
of the soul was predicted, you arrived,

a child thing yourself, I asked you, out of whose dream
did your tiny god disperse, burning
your fortune’s immensity? Might you
step outward whispering, I saw you. Might you name
the woods anew, stand in a thicket
among the unburnt pine
searching the distance granted
by your dominion. First you,
then you.

I have let home your dead. Let
snow loosen, glitter the earth.

—

This selection comes from Maureen Alsop’s book of poetry Mantic, available from Augury Books. Purchase your copy here!

Maureen Alsop, Ph.D. is the author of several poetry collections including Appartion Wren, Mantic, Later, Knives & Trees, and Mirror Inside Coffin (forthcoming). www.maureenalsop.com

Marika von Zellen has a BA in English and Creative Writing from Cornell College (no, not the one in Ithaca). She’s had poetry and fiction published in Open Field, Temporary Infinity, The Grin City Monthly, and the anthology Rock & Roll Saved My Soul. As an Editorial Assistant for Sundress, she’s copy-edited the book Picture Dictionary (2014); as a freelance editor she copy-edited the photography book Face It (2013). In the summer of 2012, she attended the Grin City Collective Artist Residency in Iowa. Besides writing, she enjoys theoretical physics, playing piano, ghost-hunting, climbing trees, and drinking good Czech beer. She’s also a scholar of Lewis Carroll.

Notes From the Blue Terrace

The pink lungs of a mule strain toward shade, his
yellowed lips saliva slick. The gardener wanders
late into the hills, unclothed in delirium. The nub
of his work thickens into bloom. He spends the day
threshing thrashing thatching until
the weight of a painted magpie
steadies him. One arm of the constellation
is a wing glazed with heat— a perfectly
beautiful waste of talent. Along the riverbank I water
my horse. The tin-rain-slosh shimmers
down her flank. The gardener stops and asks me:

What is it to die like this? He opens

his palm. He sees nothing in me astonished
by his offering. I am in the place he would not
circle—a lovely drop in his voice,
the makeshift sound of a tanager in the backyard
of a monastery. The gardener turns in shadow
to retrieve a blue trace of awkwardness. The sun
here is also crazed.

—

This selection comes from Maureen Alsop’s book of poetry Mantic, available from Augury Books. Purchase your copy here!

Maureen Alsop, Ph.D. is the author of several poetry collections including Appartion Wren, Mantic, Later, Knives & Trees, and Mirror Inside Coffin (forthcoming). www.maureenalsop.com

Marika von Zellen has a BA in English and Creative Writing from Cornell College (no, not the one in Ithaca). She’s had poetry and fiction published in Open Field, Temporary Infinity, The Grin City Monthly, and the anthology Rock & Roll Saved My Soul. As an Editorial Assistant for Sundress, she’s copy-edited the book Picture Dictionary (2014); as a freelance editor she copy-edited the photography book Face It (2013). In the summer of 2012, she attended the Grin City Collective Artist Residency in Iowa. Besides writing, she enjoys theoretical physics, playing piano, ghost-hunting, climbing trees, and drinking good Czech beer. She’s also a scholar of Lewis Carroll.