Author: Justin
On Your Knees
Don’t Go To Heaven By Yourself
Behind Glass
Don’t, they say, don’t,
like all things behind glass.
Unlatched Stars
Love, accepting that we are not pure and lucent hearts, ricocheting towards each other like unlatched stars—no, we are tainted with self. We sometimes believe the self is an invisible glass, just as we believe the body is a suit made of meat. Doubt all things invisible. Doubt all things visible.
– Descartes
The Here is Her
“The here is her,” he said, over and over
without turning round. Wait he kept
thinking, and he waited in that waiting
and knew every time we speak we stun
the word, so he hummed, but the humming
grew, each bee’d syllable toward
a name, and as he turned
almost surprised to read its sign—Eurydice
Eurydice—now the radio of his voice
dismantling sound.
– from Eurydice & Orpheus by Mark Iwin
The Book of Funnels
sometimes, when I can’t sleep, I drag my sleeping bag
into the meadow’s precise center
& crawl inside, head first. Fräulein, there is the stars’
ceaseless drilling. I close my eyes. Somewhere below me
a star-nosed mole cuts its webbed hand
on a shard of glass. I close my ears
& over my body the current of a young doe
eddies, ripples across the field, a low-lying midnight fog
swirling after her, falling back, suspended. I know you are close.
The scar on my cheek burns. I think of reentering
your atmosphere,
your long, burning hair
Don’t move. The slightest motion
& this landscape, erased by floodlights
– Christian Hawkey
memoryhouse 