3.16.16

I liked these two poems together, although they are different enough. There are obvious comparisons, like the presence of flowers, water, the literal and figurative opening of human subjects, and how the living things outside our bodies can be inside our bodies as well. The second poem has an overt religious mention, and I am wont to find one in the first, although it is not overt. Do you find a religious theme in the first, or is it merely the tone that sounds like supplication/prayer? What do you find between these two works?



How to Prepare the Mind for Lightning


Brynn Saito



In the recesses of the woman’s mind
there is a warehouse. The warehouse
is covered with wisteria. The wisteria wonders


what it is doing in the mind of the woman.
The woman wonders too.
The river is raw tonight. The river is a calling


aching with want. The woman walks towards it
her arms unimpaired and coated
with moonlight. The wisteria wants the river.


It also wants the warehouse in the mind
of the woman, wants to remain in the ruins
though water is another kind of original ruin


determined in its structure and unpredictable.
The woman unlaces the light across her body.
She wades through the river while the twining

wisteria


bleeds from her mouth, her eyes, her wrist-veins,
her heart valve, her heart. The garden again
overgrows the body—called by the water


and carried by the woman to the wanting river.
When she bleeds the wisteria, the warehouse
in her mind is free and empty and the source


of all emptiness. It is free to house the night sky.
It is free like the woman to hold nothing
but the boundless, empty, unimaginable dark.

Cut Lillies 

Noah Warren



More than a hundred dollars of them.

It was pure folly. I had to find more glass things to stuff them in.

Now a white and purple cloud is breathing in each corner

of the room I love. Now a mass of flowers spills down my dining table—

each fresh-faced, extending its delicately veined leaves

into the crush. Didn’t I watch

children shuffle strictly in line, cradle

candles that dribbled hot white on their fingers,

chanting Latin—just to fashion Sevilla’s Easter? Wasn’t I sad? Didn’t I use to

go mucking through streambeds with the skunk cabbage raising

bursting violet spears? —Look, the afternoon dies

as night begins in the heart of the lilies and smokes up

their fluted throats until it fills the room

and my lights have to be not switched on.

And in close darkness the aroma grows so sweet,

so strong, that it could slice me open. It does.

I know I’m not the only one whose life is a conditional clause

hanging from something to do with spring and one tall room and the

tremble of my phone.

I’m not the only one that love makes feel like a dozen

flapping bedsheets being ripped to prayer flags by the wind.

When I stand in full sun I feel I have been falling headfirst for decades.

God, I am so transparent.

So light