O Keeper of the Dreaming Skull, I am in Love with Everything

red wine tells me so    and poetry

come hell        come mother flooded

 

sky igniting  tossing cottonwoods

upon raftered lids        O gale conjurers

 

O maples in bodacious feather

needle-strewn fir on lawns across town

 

High    I was that       and more than half

gone    I saw like an animal

 

in darkness      all things couched between

the lines           How long must I wait for

 

sanity to return            bear this dis-

quiet like a head in vice-grip

 

muscle-shudder           love-a-lurk

an albino gorilla

 

in my childhood closet            O mother

the tide comes high     nigh your heart

 

and still so much has yet to be conceived

and still our mouths sewn shut resist

 

wind damped against lips       O keeper

of the owls defying night        you sent me

 

little planet      to float on my own

with my little box of bones

 

golden-eyed and bared

into an orbit too long   and undiscovered

---

Poet and photographer Ronda Piszk Broatch is the author of Lake of Fallen Constellations (MoonPath Press, 2015). Seven-time Pushcart Prize nominee, Ronda is the recipient of an Artist Trust GAP Grant, a May Swenson Poetry Award finalist, and former editor of Crab Creek Review. Her journal publications include Atlanta Review, Blackbird, Prairie Schooner, Fourteen Hills, Mid-American Review, and Public Radio KUOW’s “All Things Considered.” She has work forth-coming in Sycamore Review, Palette Poetry, and Tishman Review.