Reception
October isn’t autumn
anymore. Smoke signals
and summer passes
on its laze, its long wait for fire
-break. We receive the weather, or else
it acts on us. Trust whichever lets
rest less uneasy. Dried leaves left
unread in their cups with no
forecast for finales no hazarded
guess at the end. Time
for divining in ash and in ember,
unasked gifts giving again.
Grassland kicking up kindling.
The breeze unbreathable here.
The noises we were
hearing we still are, the growing
roar warning retreat
or relent. Pass it on.
The cry, the clang,
the alarm singing along
our thinning skins.
Hard to see through
the threat of it, past the terracotta
of the rooftops to the same
of the sky. Hard to catch wind
of a way out. Hard to hold
to hope or stay the hand bent
on breaking windows when
the fire has our backs. Pass
the last exit. Pass the matches.
What is coming for us
already is.
Woman Running Night
I sense the roads I don’t
want to know, the turns
that end dead, the dead.
The way I go, harm.
I don’t speak of the fear
for fear. For what follows
the rush, the flush, the height
of life or light shining teeth
-bright through black.
Then dark choking back
across streets, airless
squeeze of what I believe.
What I don’t know
I want. Bad weathers battering
the gutter, rifling from a long
shot, straight to the throat.
If I had a weapon it would be handled
gold, bladed opal, useless.
If I had any sense. If I did. There is no
defending this. Even at the trachea,
the crossroad, the carotid. The crosswinds
confusing adrenaline for incentive. I speak
of it here for fear, for love
of it. The path branches, shoulders
what I couldn’t know, didn’t want.
What follows me careening at speed
I now sometimes hope will catch.
I have come to desire what I can’t
avoid. What is the use.
Where I go from this, what I know
better, how I wish. A bruise, an evidence.
I have come to quiet down. Wound
that I am opening
that I am, ask me.
No. Tell me
what is the harm.
Prussian Blue
For two decades I had lost
skirts and shoes to
jealousy, and so had you.
So we were. Savage
and covetous and joined
at our hips, by the shape
and shade of our eyes, or the cut
of our tongues. How we lied
of love. How we took each other
at the word. How many
of my missings
fell in fact to theft,
the sorority of
gifts? To this day I swell
and break seasick
below memories or forgeries,
surfacing in your shirt stolen and
splashed with The Great Wave
off Kanagawa. Since we last
spoke I’ve learned the new
hue of that famous ocean
was called a revolution;
unexpected and enduring,
born by an accident
of blood. Concentrated just right,
that color could cure almost
any poisoning. Yet in spite
what was wrong with us
went fatal. A familiar,
enduring accident; a slip
of cyanide, a rip tide.
How I surface blue
-lipped searching for the last
wreckage floating, the antidote
to the fallout. Any thing
we might still share.
Fallows and Fault Lines (II)
When I think of gemstones
I smell the meat of metal in my pulse.
When I say I can’t speak straight I mean
that there is no bronze in the blood.
I collect minerals carved in the shapes
of eggs and I don’t know why -
the collecting or the carving, the nature of it all.
I mark the seasons now by the warnings
for floods or fire. I mark the dangers now by the
bodies laid out for collecting or carving,
the kindred copper of veins. I hope that they held
even half this fury. I hope that they held
at least more than this fear. When I say
an egg is an egg I mean that it is not
a newborn at all. When I say
I lay my body - when I say my body -
I mean that it is my body.
I held a hand over my nested ribs and cried out.
I held a hand over my belly and hoped.
This is the first time I have spoken of this;
this is the last time I will speak of this.
It was nothing more than pulling
a splinter of silica from the opal of an open
wound. What I held was only cold
earth and metal rust, unshed. What I carry
still is a flutter whenever I fail
to bleed - nightmares of snares, flattened
fields; a shard of mica catching the last
of the sunshine, or the first sight of fire.
When say I pray for fertility I mean
for anyone but me. I mean it.
I haven’t seen a fledgling since I was pregnant.
I haven’t hoped for anything so hard since then.
I didn’t tell anyone until I told everyone.
Now I hold and carry and say
only what I will bring to meaning.
When I say the way I word this biology
lays my whole life on a wide open vein
I mean that the softest pearl speaks
to an intrusion, but also a strength.
Skeleton Key
I left our other home before
the beginning.
We wallpapered over that life
in final artifice, in foreclosure.
I kept the key knowing
the locks would never be
the same. Now
that memory opens
nothing. Now in dreams
doors only closing.
Now I must stop calling
nightmares dreams.
Now they worry for what I will leave
behind, if I leave;
across the sea lives everyone
who does not know me.
At the end I sat peeling layers
from the stairway
for days, never found
the everlasting beneath.
What will I leave behind,
when I leave?
Across the sea will stay everyone
who could not open me.
I’ll stop calling.
I’ll keep the key.
Christine Barkley is a writer based in the Pacific Northwest. Her poems and personal essays have appeared or are forthcoming in The Manhattan Review, Grain, The Journal, Rust and Moth, Massachusetts Review, Salamander, The Indianapolis Review, and the Pinch, among others. She is a poetry reader for TriQuarterly and The Maine Review.