Sheila Black
Sheila Black is the author of five poetry collections, most recently Radium Dream from Salmon Poetry, Ireland. Poems and essays have appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, The Nation, The New York Times, and elsewhere. She is a co-editor of Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability. Honors include a 2012 Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress for which she was selected by Philip Levine. She lives in San Antonio, TX and Tempe, AZ where she is assistant director of the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing at Arizona State University (ASU).
Aubade for Longing
There are still songs to be sung on the other
side of the human.
Even as paradise turns to winter,
the whales
disappear with their soundings, absence stitches
the caverns of sea.
Infinitesimal spaces in my brain grow and split—
sieve of shadowbox, saint’s relic,
plane tree, bread-and-butter. A car
careens a curve, a radio in a distant room,
a song about what stops.
And what are you but this flicker inside me
for which I invent fingers and
elbows, a head of hair,
flux of light in a city I have not visited
in years,
pavement
that bears our fleeting mark,
posters peeling and you, you, you,
a silence that swoops through,
arguing endlessly against the notion
of silence.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Image by Nadin Sh from Pexels
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
© 2024 Iron Oak Editions
Stay Connected to Our Literary Community. Subscribe to Our Newsletter
Listen:
