Maureen Alsop

BIO

Maureen Alsop, Ph.D. is the author of, Mirror Inside Coffin (Cherry Grove Imprint), Mantic (Augury Books), Apparition Wren (Main Street Rag), Later, Knives and Trees (forthcoming) and several chapbooks. Her chapbooks include a blade of grass made bare by its own anatomy (Blue Hour Press), Luminal Equation in the collection Narwhal (Cannibal Press), the dream and the dream you spoke (Spire Press), 12 Greatest Hits (Pudding House), Nightingale Habit (Finishing Line Press) and Origin of Stone. Reyezuelo Aparición (Apparition Wren) was translated into Spanish by Mario Dominguez Parra.

 

 

October, Aubade

We moved without substance, a worn familiarity. My body,
a guest in a dream. I saw myself— ………………a conscious ether
alive in emptiness. Dusk’s unanswerable ghost remained.

I chose to love you, and under your name I became
weightless, as bees in the heart’s dry current.

Within the mouth of the sun
…………..I read the anonymous signals within signals,
………………………………….unspecified visions of my death—
I asked as I was.
…………..Love’s ash hurried as swarm. What dark obsession leaned against us in the grass.

 

Prothalamion

I fingered our forecast, the wind conjured a horse. You
……….cupped my face in your hands, replayed the dusk-small girl
who eyed the hundred dead. Rust-colored

clouds mottled our edges—and we, in the waxing phases, heat of our heart, walked
hand in hand into snow covered avenues. But our eyes did not speak. Perhaps
that song was the reeds in a loom following street-fire. Our spells repeated.

We rode through milestones where devil’s sparrow flocked the grass. Did you believe
in prediliction? Out here

the sun moves without shade, visibility.

 

[Elegy In Green Abatement: You Designate Seeing As The Seer]

We will press love’s thistle into thumb. We will love without temper
-ance.
………………………O blur sky’s swarm stings muscle wide. Night falls

back into it’s destructive eyes to salt the lamp. Lapse was not
…………………..the sound the omen loosened into the swift,

nor being, nor fallacy’s variations: horse among deer grass, a burnt
landscape as ground sparrows.

………….It was a secret faded & sealed in emulation.
Whose equinox between ghost’s void? Whose wheel?

What rope did you bring.

 

CONCHOMANCY
             divination by means of seashells

The bells and burlap sky
bear orchid’s domain. Perhaps

firmament as shadow; waves
will not rise through the heart.

They are the transport of wood, of heat, of coin.
Daylight, as a single arm adjusts the surface.

Orbital maps exist at the center. We were
not talking about the space beyond our muted hands,

but of the snow inside our bones.
Projections in flat planes, salt phases,

figures unfinished in moonlight.
Time, my desire to sit in a chair near a window. Listen—

Night’s perfect speech.
Our boat as paper elegies,

the subject of distance.

 

 

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