Back to Issue Fifty-Eight

EMILY BRONTË

by ANASTASIA K. GATES

 

—for Rebecca Godfrey

Like the bullet
   and billet-doux of blooms
in late summer’s wither,
                         a house finch
                 breaks from the brush
of marsh mallows
                                    in morning,
then lands on my limb
                   as if she mistook
my soliloquy for stem
                              and at the touch
            of her talons, I think
of the Brontë’s—
                       wily and unworn
in the moors—
             Charlotte pelerine collared
and bone buttoned
      beside Anne, bare ankled
                         under ivory parasols,
Branwell’s strut
                    of sherry stupor
spilt on his claret cravat
                   and my late Professor—
saying I looked like Emily
                                     in seminar,
the ungodly pyre
                        of my pen
                 lit at my sweater hem
with the torchlily
                                      in my lapel
and dawn buttressed
           from the dark of a dove
and since,
                     I was taken with her—
          taken like rain
into the beaks of
                        house finches,
            taken with the flock
into the swamp weed
                                   and bulrush,
             throats scraped silver
with seed,
                        taken with her
                                     like the birds—
draw back the bridge
                         like arrows
                                     and there,
            a terrifying fire
burns,
                                    taken with her
like rain and arrows,
                 taken like my body
                                 becoming the bird.

 

THE MANGROVE

by ANASTASIA K. GATES

 

—for M

1.

The man drowned in the mangrove.
            He was bird and man,
boy and man to me.                 Swans
                            sung my auntie
to him from sleep, dead in the dawn.
            That night,
                            he unburied the man
and drowned the bird and boy
                       with a basalt boutonnière
and the Moon —
            dragged him back
on her white handkerchief
                             like the drowned dog
with his dabbled coat,
                   tumescent on the tide
            like a marble marionette.

2.

He told me of his death—
                                       the last pome
            picked from the tree
and pared pin neat
            in the heart, the fruit rufous
and ruinous as the abbey
                                 of his vineyard,
            head in reverend bow
as the breeze to the branches
                   burdened with the berry
and my tongue tinged
                         with the grape of a god,
             as if I fed on the bird and boy
until all that remained of him was man.
            I hear the bird—
                                     beat his beggar bowl
and warble for the water.
                                   Wind in the trees
            as swans stir from sleep,
he stammers harsh then harps into song.

 

Anastasia K. Gates is a writer, editor, educator, and artist from the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. Nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best New Poets, and awarded the shortlist for the inaugural Oxford Poetry Prize, her poetry has been published or is forthcoming in The Adroit Journal, Gulf Coast, The Penn Review, and elsewhere. A 2026 Gregory Djanikian Scholars Finalist, she earned her Masters of Fine Arts in Poetry from Columbia University in the City of New York, and she is currently at work on her debut book of poems. She resides in Denver, Colorado.

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