Ryan Flaherty
from The Narrows
And again dawn
cracks our terrariums
and eats us
whole, we thresh
air, the current
foils and stints
air we gulp
and cough on,
we rut and ferret
the hallows,
bright pinchers vs
dark, a poised
frog egg bursts
its wax,
an ethereal
panic lifts
and we swallow
air and dark like
deadweight
and greenwood
limbwheeling
the current,
marrow
like a fungus,
air like welkins
cloudy
in the cave mud,
frog legs
scissoring open
the gelatinous,
white water
chuting like quartz,
we backhive
and rend
to pieces, our bones
tense and thresh
like reeds,
we go larval
and dense through
the narrows,
we range into
mineral, pulse
as groundwater,
fleck semaphores
and platelets,
eclipse and decant
into fissure,
and still our
inflorescent
metabolism cranks,
just make
it up, dark
giving light shape
vs light giving
dark an angle,
let’s repeat
ourselves
for clarity
until our crackling
translucence
hushes us
to ash, and our awful
child presses
close a flume
of breath,
a dank form
of genesis
somewhere
between
a bite
and a kiss,
and with magnetic
obedience,
we flee vascular
and none,
millions
and none, back
to the surface.
Ryan Flaherty‘s first book of poems, “What’s This, Bombardier?,” won the Lena Miles Wever Todd Poetry Series from Pleiades Press/LSU Press. He also has two chapbooks from Bateau Press and Small Fires Press. Forthcoming and recently published poems and essays can be found in Conjunctions, Boston Review, BOMBlog, Columbia and Crazyhorse.