By: Stephanie L. Harper
Missive (To the White Oak's Depths)
i don’t find it a stretch to conceive
that you could one day be six hundred years old
& eyeing from your branch-tips a skyline of heliotropes
cultivated by aliens in the epoch that follows
humanity’s obliteration;
yet, i can make out no ghost
of your hands & fingers
beneath my feet,
piercing fathom upon fathom,
defying darkness,
transcending bedrock-skull.
O Engineer of Shadow!
Excavate my flesh-bound bulb
from the paltry daylight, & ferry me
with your thirsty tresses’ millions
in a leathered elbow’s crook
down,
down into the black
stratum of blindness
the earth’s pressure transmogrifies
into vision
like a volcano’s belly
crushing coal into diamonds,
that my ruddy blood can dream
amidst the mycelial thrum
new vessels
to take root…
Imagine!
the great cloud i will accrete of your unseen
cosmos’ spent sugars in the worm-spewed earth
to ignite myself a star…
Elegy for My Former Self
Since your passing,
I’ve begun to capitalize
my first-person pronoun
in these efforts to have more
compassion for the uncommon
diamond fleck of a you
I used to persecute.
I never knew, before,
to carbon-date the combers’
trouncing eons you endured,
nor imagined (I swear)
what salt-bloated notions you shared
with your silicone-based quintillions
of counterparts in self-burial beneath
the millennia’s flotsam of sea-death.
Who could’ve guessed you just needed
to wait for that rarest of squalls
to blow through & leave the beach
ravaged in its briny slaver,
that with the new dawn,
you might flicker?
Stephanie L. Harper is a recently transplanted Oregonian living in Indianapolis, IN. Harper is the author of the chapbooks This Being Done and The Death’s-Head’s Testament. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in Slippery Elm Literary Journal, Cathexis Northwest Press, Whale Road Review, Moonchild Magazine, North Dakota Quarterly, Panoply, and elsewhere.