Joann Deiudicibus

“I say to myself, sometimes repeatedly, ‘I’ve got to get the hell out of this hurt…’ But no. Hurt must be examined like a plague.”   -Anne Sexton in a letter to Frederick Morgan 

It moves, this ache, a chill wind 
at the back of the neck, lifts 
fine hairs as fields of grass,
twists itself into bright heat, turns
sharply into flesh, a rope about the throat.  

Lift your feet like smoke, it says.
Become sky: an unseen flurry of ash 
blinking into and out 
of existence.  

The hunted run breathless through 
October’s sear and gloaming.
Gloom moves through…
burning a path back to harvest.
What buds from belly and cry? 

First freeze fell late this year.
Still by now, you’ve grown cold:
Reaped from strange cloth, 
threshed, cut down, cleaned. 
Nothing is something after all. 

Build a prayer against burial grasses,
gravity. Birth ghosts that harrow 
and haunt all smiles. Leave darkness 
behind in the helix of the mind.
Swallow your own fire.