Back to Issue Twenty.

repentance

BY F. DANIEL RZICZNEK

j

If gravity cannot be shaken
like an immense breath reversed,

then there was never
the voice and never the chorus—

never snow gathering you up,
no mornings spent gauging

your own stubbornness swaying
in the sky’s branches: dark

globes fewer until just one,
then days passing without

that last walnut dangling on.
The sound entered, a wind

rhyming everything with else
and the room shuddered,

hit heaven and fell flat
while the snow collected more

and more of you: grown child
testing the errand of light, ears

scanning the unhorizoned years
until tuned again to North.

 

Daniel Rzicznek is the author of two poetry collections, Divination Machine (Free Verse Editions/Parlor Press, 2009) and Neck of the World (Utah State University Press, 2007), as well as four chapbooks, most recently Live Feeds (Epiphany Editions, 2015). His recent poetry has appeared in Volt, Kenyon Review, Massachusetts Review, The Pinch, Drunken Boat, and elsewhere. Also co-editor of The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Prose Poetry: Contemporary Poets in Discussion and Practice (Rose Metal Press, 2010), Rzicznek teaches writing at Bowling Green State University in Ohio.

Next (Christos Kalli) >

< Previous (Jordan Zandi)