Amy Ash & Callista Buchen
Wind Chime as Light
bells, wind, glass, orchestra
illuminate, shine, glare, luster
Like a glass hand, a cluster of icicles
sistering song, we grip the air, sound
ferried across shadow, across
a field of stones, frozen and hard.
Welcome or warning, this clinking whisper
reminds us of lost stars, burning so hot
they forget they are gone, their heat
its own cry, what claims us, wants
to be held against darkness. Sight
becomes touch, gaze as immortality
grasping back. We reach for it, hold
the ice-burn, palm atmosphere even as
we feel its reverberation settle, even echo
echo in wind, flashes of the future past,
shadowed movement and glint, an end.
Hammer as Quilt
mallet, beat, shape, pound
cover, throw, spread, comfort
We bury our feet into hills of sand, this desire for mountain
unmoved by the shifting of our feet, tectonic plates that threaten
stone toward dust, that disrupt the rhetoric of the lake, all pulse
and pounding. What will be forged in the shoreline, where water
presses against what we’ve built, this mandala of our body, ready
for wear and loss. Maybe destruction is neutral, like a wave,
like gravity. We have always been waiting. We have always been
drawing lines into shrouded ground, forming a language that speaks
in symbol and chalk. This is how we build what we imagine
holds warmth, its force and weight spreading wide. This is how
we ignore the signals of our body, the pull of the world beyond
straining the patchwork of fabric and seam, until even boundaries
seem to tear. The next summit and then the next, one grain
compressed into another, again, again.
Morning flares. We begin.
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Amy Ash is the author of The Open Mouth of the Vase. She is an assistant professor and director of the creative writing program at Indiana State University.
Callista Buchen is the author of the chapbooks The Bloody Planet and Double Mouthed, and the full-length collection Look, Look, Look, forthcoming from Black Lawrence press. She is an assistant professor of English at Franklin College.