CAPILLARIES OF ROOTS / image by Amalie Flynn

WOUNDED
—to Laura

Bleating thing without wool
Thunder without sound
Ghost of wooded peaks, of constricted arterial waters

There is a dog inside the heart, voice bursting
Interminable silence, blown-open iris

Over organs buried deeper in the earth
where capillaries of roots still bleed orange dust

Leave me be, hot tongue of fireflies,
PAAAAAcracked pharynx of ice

Do not ask me to slip
PAAAAAdown among green nerves of water-weed
PUT_CAAAAAAAAwhere the flesh of the sky
is unmoving and fruitless

The moon still hovers in its surgeon’s coat

But do not try to satisfy the dead
who hold on with claws like desperate fevers

Leave my sutured skull of empty ivory forever

But pity me; put an end to this much hurt

PUT_CAAAAI am love, I tell you
and all the quick wings accumulating

as restlessly as the breaths

PAAAAAAthat were once inside

these wheel-crushed, wind-scattered leaves

Stephen Massimilla

Stephen Massimilla is a poet, scholar, professor, and painter. His multi-genre Cooking with the Muse (Tupelo Press, 2016) won the Eric Hoffer Award and many others. His new poetry book, Frank Dark, is forthcoming from Barrow Street Press; and he is coeditor of Stronger than Fear: Poems of Compassion and Social Justice. Previous books and awards include The Plague Doctor in His Hull-Shaped Hat (SFA Press Prize); Forty Floors from Yesterday (Bordighera Prize, CUNY); The Grolier Poetry Prize; the Van Rensselaer Prize, selected by Kenneth Koch; a study of myth in poetry; many Pushcart nominations; etc. He has recent poems in AGNI, American Literary Review, Chelsea, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, The Literary Review, Poetry Daily, Poet Lore, The Southern Review, Tampa Review, Verse Daily, and hundreds of other publications. Massimilla holds an MFA and a PhD from Columbia University and teaches at Columbia and The New School. www.stephenmassimilla.com and www.cookingwiththemuse.com