Archetype
BY GABRIELLA R. TALLMADGE
2020 Gregory Djanikian Scholar in Poetry
Horses on the ridge
when I’m finally sleeping,
long diamonds on their faces.
They smell like dung and star anise.
They bow to the palace
of shadows that a dream is.
Up and over the ridge is Satan,
a lonely horse himself.
I can only tell his face
is lovely, tender knobs
rise from his forehead.
He lets me listen to his thoughts with him,
how he turns each phrase
like a mirror up to his face. Once I was an angel,
then I was a snake.
I came to Eve because she was
as I was—drawn to solitude,
warmth, the light
blinking inside her own mind.
He stands
on his hind legs to assess
the crop of dreamers
watching him. I look to him
like a floating staircase, smoke framing
a mouth. I wander towards
waking awhile
before looking back at the ridge, the fallen.
Satan calls out to ask me
if I thought choice
was just a fallacy. As if
Eve thought twice
to follow the horses wherever
they were going.
Marriage a Pair of Wild Dogs
BY GABRIELLA R. TALLMADGE
Previously appeared in Indiana Review.
2020 Gregory Djanikian Scholar in Poetry
Hoard & tooth. House & bone.
Hounded. Held. Hound us,
we bite. We, bitten, house
a crown of teeth.
We own no wish, we
need. We are hungry.
Language dead, we bond
to dogs who roam
with us, dig us
from our silent home.
We come from wounding,
born harmful, bow-tight. We
are hours asked why?
Every increment of how
crowds the gangway
of our throats
but we have no word
for hurry just the snow
come hard at dawn.
We are rutted in
our empty, our migrant,
our lost. For this we make
small dangers. None other
breeds to loss.
The Animal Afterward
BY GABRIELLA R. TALLMADGE
Previously appeared in Passages North.
2020 Gregory Djanikian Scholar in Poetry
When all the milk teeth have fallen
and our gums are fresh, wet,
raw—when the calcification has begun
to fuse one rib and a digit
to the next—when the sun bleaches
our skull matte—when sand
has rubbed the rest of us smooth,
we can shed our outer
wounds, the matted tufts too tough
to pass off as skin.
And then burrow in each other,
the only other—
the I, the you. How long ago
was the first season,
our first spring—my first nest
hairy with bees?
We stalked each other, our only
other, held down
with stiff spine, stuck need.
It was the prologue with limbs.
And I’ve kept every tooth,
veins dried inside them.
Pinned up the slough to the walls
inside me in rows
like roses. I’ve slept with clippings
of your whiskers braided
into the hem of my sheets. You’ve
left traces of your claws,
marked me in stripes you’d find
only on a fish. We will
always have each other like this.
Leviathan and Behemoth—
us in the beginning, us meeting
the end and starting again.
After our epoch they’ll find us
as skeletons under the ocean,
water will peel away to show
what we had been.
We’ll be raw bones, but again,
we’ll have breath.
How Woman Inherits the Earth
BY GABRIELLA R. TALLMADGE
Previously appeared in Phoebe.
2020 Gregory Djanikian Scholar in Poetry
Come some blood, some gristle. Let myself be unfurled,
red tongue rolled out, wine-thick, a wave.
Speak myself into existence. Open wide the cage inside me,
survey my boning, my nerve, the lit lace of me.
Not long before the thaw, I was carved, crushed as snow.
Was made to shatter, was ice. Underground spring turned hungry,
I turned mindless fog, spirit in the grass. I rinsed myself thin like droplets.
I could hear myself disappearing— erasure— back into a cloud.
Back to phantom lung, gauze unpacked from snow, silver beaded shadow,
white liver, frost tongue. Now long pastures of my voice unveil themselves
by lightning. The net of veins, damp ribbons in my chest, untie
their knots—I sing. I breathe— my lungs patterned after
two warped mandolins. My limbs—unfolded maps of open water.
Come some sound, some answer. Come the cells that build the blood,
the crumbs of notes in music. Let not my fear, my love for this world
be a coagulant. Let me bring it to my lips and drink.
