Alchemy; Eclipsed with Disrespect for Galileo Galilei; Elliptical

By: Anders Howerton

Alchemy

I am not listening

to anything

but the woman 

plucking cans 

from an idea of treasure. 

Her fingers rain 

sands of trash alum.

Later, she will bottle-nurse 

a wild dog. 

She won’t ever 

put it down. 

She‘d rather let it go out

to die of domesticity. 

The cuspid puncture 

brushes the subcutis; 

she lets it taste blood, 

lets it scream in the night 

like a flock 

of what I want:

to hear the being ricochet —

ingot made of body. 

​

Eclipsed with Disrespect for Galileo Galilei

We cast our motions misconceived 

like spilled emotions to the place 

from which our bones were thrown. 

You are the kiln, fixed body, 

yet we draw your quotient

falling, setting, rising, 

going down. Stationary sphere,

you stand and burn, casting spears

in our direction. 

We spin repeatedly around 

and measure bony notions 

in these bodies of convection.

Shadows of a rope swing swaying 

(you’re staying and going) 

or spilling from a tipping bell –

you sit synthesized

and stellar still. In darkness 

we are soothed. Drawing motions,

drawings move: falling, falling, fell.

​

Elliptical

She orbits imbalanced, her axis tilted like a houseplant too long unturned toward the heat and light; every day of every revolution her face grows arid in places. She watches from satellites as her sands slip and her strata tabulate, calls her body's unused fuel sections of death, this bitumen. She relies on momentum, unperturbed curves, union set in motion by a ratio of tension. She is of two lights; the gaseous and the other's gibbous heart  tautly bind her foci pole to pole.

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Anders Howerton lives and works in Oakland, California. He has a Master's in Poetry from the University of East Anglia.