Brute Fact
Melissa Severin
dancing girl press, 2008
About the Author:
Melissa Severin lives in Chicago and works in search engine marketing. She earned her MFA in Poetry from New England College and her poems have appeared in MoonLit, 42Opus, and The Cultural Society.
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Knot Voiced
Meet me in the dovecote,
home in on the honeycomb
and I'll show shards of teeth
broken when I bit lightning.
The tongue went mosaic, a replica
of the replica; now I speak
when I'm spoken to. Wait
for a shirt to be lifted, compare
how sun passes through wounds.
Hand prints of a lost grip.
Jacob, was it your hip
against my hip, a message tied between
feathers that floated away with my voice?
Split the larynx, feed this summer, tell it I'm sleepwalking,
that I spit fists and fill shallow pools.
Listen: power lines. We’ve got to get through
this thickness of wires. I've swallowed
swords, applied the squab’s heart
to fevered feet and tied
my tonsils in a thief knot.
I invited you.
Shoot this bird and lose one
hand it only takes one to knock.
Only one breath to
ask.
*
