Haley Wooning
Elektra in the Act of Grieving
summer stars spill and split over the heathered hill
where a melancholy fog sits
thick with the mist of sleepless creatures
night soft, a long red swan wind
fluttering, long curls of hair
a gown beneath the seam
of lilac waters
I move
like a word’s trickster vein
like a word, a root-worker
moon-mad with conjuring
the language of the soul
the woman
an organ, a feral, a scythe
I am changed, I pluck words from
the gloom of another death
I once again love the things I cannot know
like a neck I lean into her soft secrets, I speak
the chasm
the cave
this monstrous fissure
in time
I am or
am not
a song that flows and stops itself
or altogether, something soft unfolding
like a tablecloth into ruin
with the yellow fields, the holding of so many
wings pulling away from
the earth’s small egg
the quick black gut flux of visibility
I, unescorted, dance
absurdly close,
and final
in the mind’s red bloom
to ask that this place no longer be empty,
sour with the world’s laborious opera
or how I come to find the eternal
the exquisite cold of becoming
something
disregarded
this is the danger:
coming too close to the thing
that cannot be named
—Submitted on 06/10/2020
Haley Wooning is the author of mothmouth (Spuyten Duyvil Publishing, 2019). Her poems have appeared in Bird’s Thumb, Hypertrophic, Lit Cat, ArLiJo, Mangrove, and other journals. Co-founder and editor of Figroot Press, Wooning lives in California with her partner and their cat, Puck.
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