FIVE POEMS
Image Captures (1)
Image Captures (2)
Image Captures (3)
from The Challenger Deep
Lifted
1.
You told me something meaningless
Took my temperature
I saved for a more difficult day
The mirror the same face, a bit threadbare
A dress too restless
Wind changed the location of the word love
You accused me of stealing sadness
Disappeared sense a lack of ceremony
Your hands, you said could not be contained
Trying to understand the nature of you
Your logic of point, line color
I was distracted from the significance
The margin of my breath waited for the flame
To passage from the eye to dawn
You, exhausted warned me against drawing
Blind I ventured a line
A tower the sky, the other hand rain
Falling you already took up too much space
Look at your body, more than fog
The sea covers, uncovers the surface of your extreme
You want to contain everything
Unimpaired by error
Then I see you leaning
Against the weight of the end of the world
It exhausts me to imagine the distance
You continue to run from danger
Where a delay of sentences might stem the steady past
Chocolate will be the last taste
In my mouth if the Plexiglas
Fails if these fifty long tons
Buckle my voice will not reach
The surface in time a response
Even traveling at a mile per
Second will reach an aftermath
Of sudden collapse a metallic
Silence unable to receive or
Send a final taste of chocolate
Before I flood frozen inside
Diatomaceous ooze an inch
Above hell my final rest taken
Invisible among ribbons of glass
To raise our gorilla knuckles from their drag
Upward to the lord into a weave of hands
We lift to such great heights lift the other up
& build a latticework to the lord we climb
Because to do otherwise is unthinkable finds
Us trapped apartments within apartments
We unhinge we are found in the hands of
Others they make us what we cannot make
With our hands too close to see with our eyes
So we ask each other to hold what our hands
Cannot we drag & weave & build each other
Back up toward the lord we compartmentalize
& find each other to decompress we press on
Hands into hands our raw knuckles folded
In prayer our gratitude offered to one another
is the author of a chapbook, Complicated Weather (Rock Town Press) & an e-chapbook, Handshake Trouble (Gold Wake Press). Some of his recent work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Spittoon, Leveler, Knock, Ping Pong, H_NGM_N, Jellyfish, Diagram & Handsome. He lives in the Illinois Quad Cities & teaches in the Iowa Quad Cities. He can be reached at ryanrichardcollins@gmail.com.