Salvation

Skin the colors of brick
peeling below the surface
without a light in the house,
near or far.
Rush in.
Raps on the window,
a cardinal who won’t go away.
Some think the bird could be a mystic,
or reincarnation of someone lost.
Animate for the birds
heather feather spine central;
a spine is central
to all endeavors.
A seahorse curls on a branch,
rings of light multiply overnight.
Dread hangs like a window-shade cord.
Hat it.
To drift nonsensically into late age                               
without a hat on
is bald and bold.
Lately been a lot of talk about “nice,”
its relation to “good.”
I ask the seahorse for a favor
even knowing they’re a cluster
of leaves on a branch,
a backward prayer,
stomach rounded upward,
skinning space.

Intervention

Be still until wreck
resolves itself. Take your
best spot among the tulips.

I travel to the world on a jewel
on a principle of trust waving
to the clouds, aurora borealis
pieced into my garment.

Let me be with,
sewn into pockets,
portals to possibilities
until age swipes
its palette of washes.

Range night & day,
ravaging oceans & their mist,
qualifying articles of behavior
in strong language,
suit to suit.

crown

some birds can sleep while flying,
half their body awake
one wing flapping

if only we could

body awake
one
      wind in sea-silver

Shira Dentz is the author of five books including Sisyphusina (PANK, 2020), winner of the Eugene Paul Nassar Prize 2021, and two chapbooks including Flounders (Essay Press). Her writing appears in many venues including Poetry, American Poetry Review, Cincinnati Review, Iowa Review, Gulf Coast, jubilat, Pleiades, Plume, Denver Quarterly, Colorado Review, Idaho Review, New American Writing, Brooklyn Rail, Apartment, Lana Turner, Poets.org, and NPR, and she’s a recipient of awards including an Academy of American Poets Prize and Poetry Society of America's Lyric Poem and Cecil Hemley Awards. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and a PhD from the University of Utah. Currently, she lives and works in upstate NY, and is Visiting Poet at the University of South Dakota. More at www.shiradentz.com

Published January 15 2023