Their translating of the terrible things we’ve said has created elsewhere animals that don’t need to eat but bite anyway anything that moves. Neither silence is real
but both belong to God. My son
my moodkiller
of ruin
in no dream I’ve had
pours gasoline on himself and leads an abandoned bear onto an empty school bus. Am I pretty this third
time
if my parents are yesterday and grief?
Ohio stories:
I am fondest of recalling my sister when sister in her sleep
could sell drugs to angels.
Men walk away from their fathers one of two ways with our favorite being Stars Reading Snowfall Before and After My Career-Ending Injury.
Our mother was a spider
once
it’s why
she smokes.
Sorrow a glove. Grief a mitten. I see in fire the small
for a whale
whale
that my son
saw
in a wave.
Ohio gets to keep its hidden season. Poverty
its sixth
finger.
Childish, but everyone who’s looked out this window has died. Our family was too close.
I see ghosts, but not first. I write, still, but more to forget what I wrote. I can’t seem to give separate lives to the not said and the unsaid. Alas, gone has a future. But, I am thankful. For those who had words for mine, for those who did not correct the words I had for theirs. For those who hated me in silence. Who loved me in my space. This will always be the year my grandmother died.
I will take for my childhood a mother’s unicycle, a father’s raincloud.
The broken moon of any man on crutches. A dog drinking water in a white house.
Brothers
who draw me naked.
Bones from her smaller baseball.
I can’t tell if I have nothing or if I’m down to three photos of God.
I sleep
to know
that you’re
asleep.
Ohio auctions:
The unseen wildlife of the ill. The handwriting of a moonless toddler. A whole language saved on an angel’s thumbnail…
I want for my son a more regular sadness. Not touch with its vacant déjà vu. Not the stutter, untapped, of his far beast. More the fasting of an unknowable fish. A marionette
gazing
at a toy
car. Are these hands? They say so little.
Spectra
poems, Ashley Toliver
Coffee House Press 2018
~
As division so sweetly misses more than one number, the poems in Ashley Toliver’s Spectra interrogate the outward math of belonging with a verse of internalized indicia that grants its punctuated yearning an unsafe passage beneath the eternal rent of its borrowed glow. By skull, by lantern, by unlit moth, these are poems of pre-loss that language themselves into the sound of those who move to gather those first, those widowed, question marks might silence be given the distance it needs to identify in peace those spaces where no map sings. This is not quiet work. Whether grieving the grace notes of a conjoined and solo life or reviving lullabies for a reversible child, Toliver corrects within hail the acoustics as petitioned for by any soft disappearance that, though made absent by an existing then, is here revealed by a now…
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