Embedded Files
Mother/Medea
I trained my children to be anti-capitalist
and now I work to support them.
The worm in the apple—does it have to be a worm?
I am trying to love my bones’ brittle, to love
the mind without the inevitable trap door,
what for so long I poured into lust or longing
now phantom-ache, pines in snow.
My children don’t like me enough.
My husband gas-lights out of habit or lack of imagination.
I am drawing a door with ice-blue chalk on the beige wall
of the second bedroom.
I am practicing the chords for “Everybody Hurts,”
planting sunflowers so they grow fence-high.
To erase the difficult self. To take a name and refigure
it into another’s—
Medea is the trap door in this poem. She burns with gorgeous
indigo. Terror is the needle of her spine.
“Here is the worst you can do,” she says, her rage
like a green-black wave, higher than my head
as she teaches me clenched finger at a time
to dive down.
Everywhere and Nowhere at the Same Time
It is a race against the sun. I think of you as I
pace the hot yard, trying to resurrect the pepper
plant, begging it with my artificial rain to unfurl
its yellowing leaves. It is a race against the moon–
that moment of stepping into dark as into
ocean, believing for the span of a few breaths
there is no boundary here. Your face floats in stars,
emerges from an indeterminate mass of
cloud. This is what it is to be ghosted. I know
what comes back is my own echo; yet how can it not
be blended in some way with what you were? I
am watching two leaves emerge from the dry earth,
a tiny fleck of green, and how it divides, divides.
Every day, the acute miracles of becoming. Each day,
the shadows folding up their umbrellas to walk home.
Fever
What I most want is a different kind of sentence,
one that admits a stillness:
The peacock feather –
that lucid
blue-green eye that is not an eye
no matter how many times we call it one.
What was it you said to me? – a few words, garbled—
but something in your hands,
a feeling as if
your hands were bleeding and I
had neglected to see.
In those days, we could try on the costumes of the war
in the charity shops at the far ends of the boulevards.
The sedge-green jackets with ornate brass buttons,
often an eagle or a man’s face.
You said they drilled into his skull but wanted him
to stay alive (the echoes of the words
in your mouth—)
I want the feeling of the bread we bought,
of peeling circus posters outside Penn Station.
.
All that has left the world. I can change
how I speak, or how I piece together
the words or
I believe I can change.
And sometimes I believe
if I were to admit a stillness,
I might find inside a salt that
will not admit the possibility of ocean. Febrile was
the word I used when sweat sheened your face or
you put out your hands to show me: How
they would not stay still.
The (Dis)ambiguation of Pain
*
A narrowing—as when in a crowd of
nattering, one voice catches, a grounded
phrase or a word that strikes you
as fringed/serrated. Dear Stranger.
Beloved. The stories you tell yourself in
recognition of a subdural loneliness.
*
Lonely—a kind of cellophane so you
move immune almost, not to be touched,
because you are already burning.
Surprised no one can smell the scorching
or see its marks on your face, a face
you hold together by keeping rigid.
*
Rigid is not the right word. Poised, particular?
As a tree is particular in holding its arms wide,
or not particular, formed by circumstance,
unable to be other, as you—minor ecology: skin
traced by the strata of average rainfall, storm
cloud. O sublime of blue lightening.
The Coming World
I watch tar slide off a roof. I think of
going to get a cold beer. Someone
left two cookies to melt on a black plastic
plate beside a fountain whose water
appears so artificially blue.
I speak to you even though you
are not here. Remember when we walked
the acequias in July, taking shelter
in thickets of bamboo, not native,
but planted there, taking root,
tiny forests of slight cool, closeted
green spaces where it was possible
to believe the coming world might
be ours? Now I am old, a person no one
notices, which in the stakes of the world,
feels a puny sacrifice. Those stakes which
appear to be splintering so the young woman
in the office next to mine jabs her eyes
with her fists, says I know I’m crazy, but
I just can’t sleep. On my long hot walk
to work, I ask imaginary you what you
think. You tell me what I feel is a natural
discarding—we go on, we get lonelier,
let go even of the ones who once felt.
as essential as the salt in our blood.
I sit on a bench under a concrete statue
of a palm tree with the young woman
I barely know. I tell her not to worry,
describe for her each greening desert thing:
datura, agave, yucca, creosote, saguaro,
the way each spring blossom arrives out of
nowhere, disappears just as abruptly,
the breathing in of all we leave.
Sheila Black is the author of five poetry collections and three chapbooks. Her most recent collection is Radium Dream (Salmon Poetry Ireland 2022). Poems have appeared in Blackbird, The Birmingham Review, Poetry, The Nation, and elsewhere. She lives in San Antonio, TX and Tempe, AZ where she is assistant director of the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing at Arizona State University (ASU).
Copyright © 2025 by Sheila Black, all rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of Copyright law. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the notification of the journal and consent of the author.
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