The Scaffolding Inside YouBy Olena Kalytiak Davis
Your thoughts have hung themselves from nails
like workshirts.
The sky has stopped
offering you reasons to live and your heart is the rock
you threw through each window
of what's deserted you, so you turn
to the burnt out building inside you: the scaffolding
overhead, the fallen beams,
the unsound framework;
according to the blue that's printed on the inside of your arms
you have no plans, no plans
uncovered, or uncovering: the offing is emptying,
the horizon empty
now that your sanity is
a tarp or a bedsheet
in the rough hands of the wind,
now that everything is hooded
in drop cloth.
It didn't happen
overnight. Or maybe it did:
your heart, the rock;
your soul, the Gothic barn.
You've even started envying the flowers their stems.
Will the Norther let up?
Will the moon ever again be so full of itself
that that ragged barn will fill with light, through its tin-covered roof?
You should bury more than the dead.
You should try harder.
You should give up.
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In Defense of Marriage
By Olena Kalytiak Davis
Marry the black horse stuck
Dumb in her humble corral.
Marry the white fences; marry the fenceless
Moon and the defenceless sky.
Marry the feedlot and the threshing
Floor. Like the northern heaven to the southern
Stars, marry the kitchen table, its three strong
Legs. Marry the gate and the small intricate
Cuts on the keys and the view spreading
Outback. The streetlamp
Weds the morning light, like that, take the
Nomad. Promise to forsake. Give in
To the cistern full of asters.
To the way the beloved
Story goes: her body from a bone
And her soul out of nothing.
In a slowly spoiling month find out
You have married the house worn
Blue on the yellowing hill: each of its
Slow budding bedrooms. Marry one or two
Or three varieties of light, in three or four
Different lifetimes. I meant, windows.
Mate, be forsaken.
I married the way moths marry.
I married hard.
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