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a literary journal published by the Black Earth Institute dedicated to re-forging the links between art and spirit, earth and society

Christopher Nelson


November Kaleidoscope

Yesterday we swept locust leaves from

the garage in T-shirts. Today

the first snow on a wind of

—in this political climate—malice.

Teeth, spit, and red gums—the cops

 

in hand-me-down DOD gear

swing swift the black batons,

riot shields flashing, the sun a white hole

above us. The rupture,

the false rapture—you milking pepper spray

 

from your beautiful eyes, one blue-green

the other hazel, the first pool I

drowned in in order to live.

 

 

2.

 

A toddler’s lost

red glove, found when last year’s gray

snowbank faded, its match long since tossed

 

and rotting, I imagine, for decades more

in a landfill—some metaphor for the soul and

its dream. Therefore, you and me.

 

And our boy, who brings a kaleidoscope to his eye,

twists the cylinder,

and what was certainty is now

 

shards and flecks of stars,

bits of mirror

to make a world from.


The Sentence

soft phalli of hyacinth,

tyrian, up and out

 

 

2.

 

a man sets himself aflame

camera catches but can’t convey

 

 

3.

 

red phallus of tulip and

open labium

 

 

4.

 

a cascade of screams

outside the courthouse

 

 

5.

 

the skin pulls back

on the white head of magnolia

 

 

6.

 

cold where the trial is

cold and rich with scorn

 

 

7.

 

honey bead

in jonquil’s lacey box

 

 

8.

 

reporter on location frantic

to describe the smell of a man burning

 

 

9.

 

yellow smoke of spring

forsythia only partly

 

 

10.

 

shielding a window where

some boys undress

 

 

11.

 

Oregon grape, its tight

nuts starting to blue

 

 

12.

 

as armored cops

gas students who

 

 

13.

 

are too pissed to put on

crowns of blooms

 

 

14.

 

is it music, music

behind the wall or

 

 

15.

 

the fabled fire come

to bless the seeds

 

 

16.

 

or mowers, whirring blades

to enact the sentence

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Christopher Nelson is the author of Blood Aria (University of Wisconsin Press, 2021) and six chapbooks, including Blue House, for which he received a New American Poets Fellowship from the Poetry Society of America. A recipient of the Amy Lowell Traveling Scholarship and a translation grant from the Goethe-Institut, he is the founding editor of Green Linden Press, a nonprofit publisher dedicated to poetic excellence and reforestation.


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