Real World Feeds
All you who feed
on the food of earth
frog
like a piece of dry leather creaking in the field
snapping up flies
hunter
licking the pot of tiger bone stew
tire
a black tongue lapping
a black cold road
Get this ghost mama off a me
What is it?
Looking for all the animals in their animal holes
You
a citadel of real cellular transparency
tangling an uncertain analogy between a lynx’s and your own
folded, sleeping limbs
your gams and
pinions and fins
like the mind: a mild or wild
snarl of yarn
Return all the soft-bodied animals
to their homes: sea pansies, anemones
boars, bears
even pet guinea pigs not distracted from being by
footsteps across the floor
We find ourselves cool and clean and in
the next hour
you’re in the night-surf, a ragged white washcloth stuffed in the corpse-mouth
ash-grey legs, wiry hairs nubbed down
what animal cadaver
do you carry
the air there
outside your window
is around
the tree
I still
care for it, all
you who
light-fingered
night-fingered
feed
:
paradise
before we
killed or
breathed
on the food of earth
frog
like a piece of dry leather creaking in the field
snapping up flies
hunter
licking the pot of tiger bone stew
tire
a black tongue lapping
a black cold road
Get this ghost mama off a me
What is it?
Looking for all the animals in their animal holes
You
a citadel of real cellular transparency
tangling an uncertain analogy between a lynx’s and your own
folded, sleeping limbs
your gams and
pinions and fins
like the mind: a mild or wild
snarl of yarn
Return all the soft-bodied animals
to their homes: sea pansies, anemones
boars, bears
even pet guinea pigs not distracted from being by
footsteps across the floor
We find ourselves cool and clean and in
the next hour
you’re in the night-surf, a ragged white washcloth stuffed in the corpse-mouth
ash-grey legs, wiry hairs nubbed down
what animal cadaver
do you carry
the air there
outside your window
is around
the tree
I still
care for it, all
you who
light-fingered
night-fingered
feed
:
paradise
before we
killed or
breathed
the tangled bank
slept synonyms
through the night
shouted regret in
kitchens
suspended consciousness
by which the body
stands, rests
and drops
darkness
into waters below
all your
shuteye
will give you this
face in utter darkness, crying
with total dedication
wantonly, with abandon
laughing into
a feeling of depth
I was thinking
thoughts don’t think
my change
and then, yet, yes
through the night
shouted regret in
kitchens
suspended consciousness
by which the body
stands, rests
and drops
darkness
into waters below
all your
shuteye
will give you this
face in utter darkness, crying
with total dedication
wantonly, with abandon
laughing into
a feeling of depth
I was thinking
thoughts don’t think
my change
and then, yet, yes
Once Water’s Heart — The hand The land
If you were a child
standing on the grass holding an ice cube in your hand
and your hand was warm, was warming
or if you were the earth holding an iceberg in your belly
the bathing veins feeding the heart
And if the ice, the mountains were talking
to the animals walking over them
The mountains and the clouds
encouraging them
The foxes and The bears
or scolding them
The rabbits and The deer
The hand, the land heating
Yes, I care about icebergs
more than I care about you, she said No,
no, I don’t
care about icebergs
more than I care about you, she
said, I do
I do
The ice embroidering the animals
stitching them in hoof and
tuft
The animals embroidering the ice step by step
If the child held out her hand
and the wolves walked over it
The friction between paw and palm igniting
The one cooling the one heating the other
And if the child’s hand
Was too hot now
To hold anything
Crystalline heart melting in our hands
Flame could not destroy these mountains
because they were made outside the mind
and animals are etched there
also in the blood in your hand
standing on the grass holding an ice cube in your hand
and your hand was warm, was warming
or if you were the earth holding an iceberg in your belly
the bathing veins feeding the heart
And if the ice, the mountains were talking
to the animals walking over them
The mountains and the clouds
encouraging them
The foxes and The bears
or scolding them
The rabbits and The deer
The hand, the land heating
Yes, I care about icebergs
more than I care about you, she said No,
no, I don’t
care about icebergs
more than I care about you, she
said, I do
I do
The ice embroidering the animals
stitching them in hoof and
tuft
The animals embroidering the ice step by step
If the child held out her hand
and the wolves walked over it
The friction between paw and palm igniting
The one cooling the one heating the other
And if the child’s hand
Was too hot now
To hold anything
Crystalline heart melting in our hands
Flame could not destroy these mountains
because they were made outside the mind
and animals are etched there
also in the blood in your hand
The Promises of Air
and I who am cold
that
world-cold
of mechanical go(l)d when
words
because they are attached
to nothing, gratis, go
floating through air where
live, yes, birds
warming the sound of that rhyming empire
pulling words out of the everyday world by snapping the neck of meter
for the road ahead
which will be air, for sure
≥
each word there
mad fair
delinked and flying
I heard the saw of feathers first, then
3 black forms whuffing
that
world-cold
of mechanical go(l)d when
words
because they are attached
to nothing, gratis, go
floating through air where
live, yes, birds
warming the sound of that rhyming empire
pulling words out of the everyday world by snapping the neck of meter
for the road ahead
which will be air, for sure
≥
each word there
mad fair
delinked and flying
I heard the saw of feathers first, then
3 black forms whuffing
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from the left, cuffing right
Crows, compass of their whuff and world,
sounded like a flock of small women
clearing their throats before diving into a pool
2 chasing the other, noisy
wings & cawing
So what was the crow story?
Two parents crazy to encourage a fledgling?
A thief? an interloper? why so pissed off?
A corvid ménage gone to the minus?
From the ground, no way to know
Here where the words lick the human forms with their dirt-driven skins
But there is the instant after the woman leaves the ground, before
her head hits the water
Crows, compass of their whuff and world,
sounded like a flock of small women
clearing their throats before diving into a pool
2 chasing the other, noisy
wings & cawing
So what was the crow story?
Two parents crazy to encourage a fledgling?
A thief? an interloper? why so pissed off?
A corvid ménage gone to the minus?
From the ground, no way to know
Here where the words lick the human forms with their dirt-driven skins
But there is the instant after the woman leaves the ground, before
her head hits the water
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First published in Your Kingdom (Coffee House Press, 2023). Reproduced by kind permission of the publisher.
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Photo by Penelope Massouri
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Born in California on Walt Whitman’s birthday, Eleni Sikelianos is a poet, writer, and "a master of mixing genres." She grew up in earshot of the ocean, in small coastal towns near Santa Barbara, and has since lived in San Francisco, New York, Paris, Athens (Greece), Boulder (Colorado), and Providence. Deeply engaged with ecopoetics, her work takes up urgent concerns of environmental precarity and ancestral lineages. Your Kingdom (Winter 2023) will be her tenth book of poetry, riding alongside two memoir-verse-image-novels.
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