The Literary Review
On Coopers Beach
Pinch rose fruit
between damp fingertips. A Labrador bitch squats,
launches into wave. Off-season
sky deflates against skiff, bare pate.
Grey even more so, whales in eastern squalls
tangle of false heather.
The drab nativity of the hatched,
their ink-washed eggs. Clemency in cloud
if any. Sky of hard blue stone.
My father splits plum skin,
the soles of his feet on fire: I’d forgot thinning.
The sunken dogfish waltzes sharp sand fleas.
A smashed castle.
Aeneas carried his father out of Troy,
Anchises who would not fight death
slumped across his son’s broad back
wide-winged heat gliding down. Heart-burst birds.
What happened after, scorched eyes
the blackness enameled
with burning gold. We crab walk to the tarry lot
mouths full of ambrosial salt
settle in the honeysuckle shade—
a smear of yolk, carbuncled sand flea bites
this hooded sorrow without shape, a liminal trespass.
- Carol Alexander
Zenith and Regrets, Dinkinesh
A chemical wind rustles the silken crops. Dinkinesh the marvelous
AL 288-1 scrounged for purple berries in the melt.
We walked two-legged before we dreamed intelligibly.
Now the world is flat again
starveling drought’s perennial. Sweet Lucy
in your shinbone, your economical cranium, leaf and tuber-fed
the deposition of each epoch crumbling
as a mastodon thaws, predicting degrees of shrinkage.
Did she bloom with child? In the station waiting for gasoline,
a mother whose infant died is leaking at the breast.
Over a bridge cemented to shorn banks, absence expands the ribcage
and the gully is iridescent with the memory of crushed bivalves.
Brown Swiss cows plod the field, confused udders pendulous;
Lucy drank no dairy, her worn teeth and vanished tongue all artifact.
Cow’s milk is for baby cows.
Twelve prime acres for immediate cash sale.
The man at the gate says all my life I’ve labored for these darned cows.
What am I supposed to do? Their long lashes, their doglike eyes.
A squad of local ghosts tread in our tire tracks,
bony metacarpals sifting corn that falls to seed, still green.
How terrible to be disappointed of a tender haunting.
Especially the netted ground-birds suspended with perpetually open beaks.
Especially the vagrant’s children scouring the land, dandelion-stained
half the average hominid height.
And Australopithecus Lucy, wondrous rift girl—
a fossil become relic, fragile assemblage under glass.
- Carol Alexander
Visible Man
To open, I press upon a seam, mar him in my own image—
crooked pinky, a scar where the spaniel tore at flesh.
Deboned of an insistent rib, the visible man claims primogeniture.
Here is body revealed in stark intimacy
to love’s flensing knife: liver plucked each day, fat in the eternal fire
then night’s burial, a recrudescence, tiny viscera reminding me of miracles.
The body open: a glass flower.
At night, floating on his breath, I think of this precursor,
soft mechanics of a vessel singular, complete.
- Carol Alexander