Posts by johnzedolik

Wildflowering

By on Nov 15, 2020 in Poetry | Comments Off

Pock-marked—yet her face is perfection, (or close enough for the reach of praise) each enlarged pore, pit a star in the banner weaving across sleek cheeks below the hunter eyes that pay no serious attention to past struggles with oil, hormones, and stress, but stake the opposing orbs that must notice the pinprick fields, blooms, before caught above, beyond the necessary...

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Riparian Life

By on May 19, 2019 in Poetry | Comments Off

The grass crackled and frozen looking like sand and salt in the Egyptian desert, the source of natron that preserved the eviscerated and brain-hollowed bodies of dead pharaohs, still draws down a gaggle of Canada geese who must remember the site and near river of life much shorter than the Nile but sustaining enough even in the tired and soiled days of February for those beaks that peck and webs that stride upon last year’s vegetation that will renew without a weighing of heart against feather by Anubis, the jackal-head, so the big birds don’t have to worry their mortal...

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If Rather Perpendicular

By on Oct 9, 2016 in Poetry | Comments Off

  If we imagined the divine as horizontal instead of vertical,   would saints have wheels—or skis, in northern reaches?   Would worshippers look into the distance with leveled eyes and   imagine their loved ones beyond the line of trees, hills, or concrete?   And would houses of worship be tunnels whose ends projected their sacred symbol,   to the vanishing point where vision failed and faith necessarily took over entirely,   in that realm of metaphor perpendicular to ours and our privileging of up and those   wings awfully useful to reach...

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