…a single sentence to the seafloor
of sky and started to scry
so hard I laughed aloud,
laughed a cloud of crickets.
Cried a crowd of droplets
dropped to earth. Ate my worth
in gold. Got told lies in cycles by
magnetite and meteor. Mired
myself muddy. Bloodied my hands
into hammers. Nailed and nailed
by nothing but nothing. Noted knots on
my knuckles matched notches
in my throat, coated in cough syrup
and caught lyric like barbed hooks
baited with contrition. Choked. Choked up.
Battered my voice into submission,
a clubbed cod deck-drawn and drowning
in open air. Open to where clouds
gather and gasp into the shape of gone. Gone
into great arrangements of rain,
great downward embraces. Rainheld hands
who tickled the peninsula's misty toes.
The land laughed my voice back. Tides
of laughter echoed all along
this woeful shoreline. Wave-traced, no man
—I am an island—
nor sound returned to listen, but
I had heard my own raised fists,
quotation marks of my voice’s
vision, lift as they said…
Prompt
Grief Alphabets & the Alliterative Engine – being bereaved can sap one of language. When I’ve come up, head first, against that great, deadening silence, I’ve found (only after long, difficult periods of trial and error) that language contains the spark of its own re-animation. I’ve also noticed that nature offers Their own recourse. Rhyme and alliteration, like tiny flames, carry thought and meaning through their flickering as it alights from one line to the next. Suddenly, a poem condenses; is created.
Make one column with an alphabetical list of words you associate with grief or the loss you are experiencing. Beside that column, make a parallel list for each letter of features in the natural world that begin with that letter. (For example, the columns for “A” might read “anguished | allium”). Once you have exhausted the alphabet, and/or your energy, revisit the lists together and pick out and elaborate on any patterns or droplets you devised. What anguished allium blossoms may sprout?
Adrian Dallas Frandle (they/he) is a poet and queer fish who writes to the world about its future. They are Poetry Acquisitions Editor for Variant Press. Book of Extraction: Poems with Teeth out now with Kith Books. Read more at adriandallas.com
Moist Poetry Journal 