Flapper Press presents two poems by our resident poet & teacher, Gillian Kessler.
I’m no longer the passive edge of an ocean
Let’s interpret habitats, habits,
decode skulls of native orchids, their labial faces,
while storm fronts pulse from the Pacific.
I’d like to seek sea with her
but instead I lie with cones of
lodgepole, our resin melts and seeds
release. We dispense our boreal
natures, matched like common loons, hair verdant.
We’ll talk ovaries and egg sacs, stare
into shadows of sundials, thoraxes gleaming
and scoured, arms akimbo for balance.
She’s my harlequin bug, splayed
softly like a gold fringed shawl.
I wish for time to be more crepuscular,
step sure on a tightrope 110 stories up, bow
slightly in my black slippers, hooves buoyant.
Fox pelts melt in the glass case,
orange feathers flare and the crash of
heads ring down the valley -
the goats are at it again. We sing
our animal bones to the wire.
Rust & Bitter Stars & Tail Winds
Toes gripped hard on desert and all the birds
sing bass. Our river is held
in conched hands while petroglyphs
sketch out prehistoric bravery.
A halogenic moth,
a swallow’s dipped flight --
crows line the road,
feast with beetle-dark eyes.
We are part legend
of creatures and treasures, heirs
to mystical lodges, orchards,
the wide and winding wash.
This is the cell of my art,
the sun-struck nucleus,
the beyond of color.
A small forever in your wild face.
Gillian Kessler is a poet, teacher, and a regular writer for Flapper Press.
Her first published book of poems, Lemons and Cement, is available for purchase here.