Issue 18: Kate Behrens
(Tom Raworth Memorial)

How the Lost Remains

 unattached to guilt  or thought

 stellate and self-lit   they taught

words beyond 

                      un aconito 

                    *

 must you see that   even clearer

than this unfolded hillside

 wedge of gold-threaded water?

it shivers blue moons over thighs

and feet that stood for less adventure

                    *

though six visible counties

buzz with lime electric currents

 wheat belonged between those elses

salix high-lit at the edges

                     *

one dress wraps

up your insides

you go out  completed

 elegant &

 nondescript as night

odd child in black

on black

                    *

blue smoke spikes

 snake and pine

      heft on tracks 

ess on sticks

                    broken-backed

kinks your cat

                         nicks riskily

                      *

wet-winged shadows

sprung from a bang 

                               echoes

 stain all these yellows

with blues

                 like silence to bells

Un aconito (It); an aconite

Kate Behrensʼ two collections, The Beholder and Man with Bombe Alaska were published respectively in 2012 and 2016 by Two Rivers Press. Other poems have appeared in various magazines and anthologies including previous issues of Blackbox Manifold, Mslexia, The Arts of Peace, an Anthology of Poetry, Sitegeist and as Oxford Brookesʼ Poem of the Week.  Some are due to come out in Stand and The High Window later on in 2017.

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