Ellen Welcker
Drone Rituals
Their pitch induces a sheaf of almonds to hatch from their shells.
It’s a casual law, round here: for every socket, a wrench.
To hum is the rule, restraint the exception.
A sack of emotions is a baby. A sack
of jewels, flagellating like cells. Lack
is to power as tail is to cathedral,
as sex is to holy, as number is to hum.
I think we can all agree: it’s relational.
I thought I bought a dress, but it’s a slanket.
I thought it was a horde of rams, but it was a herd.
Of gazelles. Horning sweetly, drowsily, from their skulls.
Ellen Welcker’s books are Ram Hands (Scablands Books, fall 2016), The Botanical Garden (Astrophil Press 2010), which was selected by Eleni Sikelianos for the Astrophil Poetry Prize. Her Chapbooks include The Pink Tablet, (Fact-Simile Editions, 2018), Mouth That Tastes of Gasoline (alice blue books, 2014); and The Urban Lightwing Professionals (H_NGM_N, BKS, 2011). Recent poems are in Okey-Panky, Gramma Daily, and Poetry Northwest, as well as in the anthology WA129: Poems Selected By Tod Marshall: State Poet Laureate, 2016–2018 (Sage Hill Press, 2017). Ellen lives in Spokane, Wash. Online at ellenwelcker.com
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