10-10-2023
George Perrault
CONVERSELY
so we were talking about ukraine,
how the sky’s on fire in pakistan
and no one gives a shit, all the
hidden costs of human rule, and she
remembers her first assignment,
ICU recovery, two girls in a week
from the same denominational school
trying to sidestep their pregnancies,
and you know how it was back then,
the alleys they had to sneak along.
that first girl, the lucky one,
she died on the table, but the second
was twelve hours of surgery
after the drāno douche,
heavy sedation postponing
the pain and the horror,
and who wants to be there
when she wakes, who
wants to explain what’s lost:
you’ve melted the urinary tract,
your bowels, all the organs in
your pelvis, and then the bone,
so much bone. these chemicals,
they have no conscience.
even after two tours in vietnam,
the things we do to each other,
she remembers that second girl,
the things we do to ourselves.
they took her down a hallway
to a room with solid locks.
termination, my friend whispers,
sometimes an elusive mercy.
HER SCHOOL GROUP OFF IN THE DARK SKY
somewhere between Denver and Heathrow
is a scrambling of half my helix while i wait
beading faith with breath held against that call:
her bones lost at sea, remembering fifth grade
an anthropologist asking the class what’s this:
a femur she said, then clavicle and pelvis,
female, no doubt, wider for the birthing,
and that skull punctuated by a bullet,
pretty small caliber, no exit wound,
everyone staring: what in the world…
a marvel how mind makes its way, young
or old, armored with audacity, singing
in trumpets and flutes the night songs
of owls, the matins of plows and yokes,
one world inherited, another to invent,
Dublin and Belfast, all those bullet holes
and the Kells, walls and ruins of walls,
things hurried along the current myths,
though love, my child, love is no fable
but the unseen river of air you ride,
a Rubik’s cube of earth churning coral
into mountain, rock burning to jewel,
a Celtic heart soughing in wonder:
your eyes so pretty when you cry
THE ASTRONOMER
in a tongue where eye and i
do not distinguish themselves
we are beholden to the beheld
we must bend the mind to know
the waves on a blazed mountain
are the fingers of a single tree
that the Pillars of Creation flower
into stars as their absence slides
toward us a thousand years away
great Azophi once fixt the stars
but everything’s in motion
even love as once i saw you
this sunlit room of earth, each
heart’s filled with atoms drifting
and we find our way through dark
-from Lie down as you were born, selected by Assistant Editor, Karen Carr
George Perreault has worked as a visiting writer in Montana, New Mexico, and Utah, and he has received awards for poetry in Nevada and Washington. While his work is primarily lyrical, he also writes in the voices of ordinary men and women in contemporary America. He has published five books of poetry: Lie down As You Were Born (Kelsay Books, 2023), Bodark County (Grayson Books, 2016), All the Verbs for Knowing (Black Rock Press, 2006), Trying to Be Round (Singular Speech Press, 1994), and Curved Like an Eye (Ahsahta Press, 1988).
