Lissa Kiernan

BIO

Lissa Kiernan is the author of Two Faint Lines in the Violet, (Negative Capability Press, 2014), a finalist for both the Foreword Reviews’ 2014 INDIEFAB Book of the Year Award and the 2014 Julie Suk Award for Best Poetry Book by an Independent Press. Her book-length braided essay, Glass Needles & Goose Quills: Elementary Lessons in Atomic Properties, Nuclear Families, and Radical Poetics, is forthcoming from Haley’s. Individual poems can be found in numerous journals and anthologies and have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Along with her MFA from the Stonecoast program at the University of Southern Maine, Lissa holds an MA in Media Studies from The New School. Ms. Kiernan’s website address is lissakiernan.com.

 

EXERCISE IN FERTILITY
~with apologies to Amy King

Naked, this body, golden-
tattered, sun-beaten:
oxygen, bacteria, tea.

I am younger than this.
I sex the dark, beget
the dark. I am younger

than the water. Opening,
I see the shape of sea.
Sometimes we begin

without, filling empty
pockets with a back
road’s stones. O island

infant, the light you
lactate the one still
yearned for. Once, if ever,

tell me how the west was
glittering, human,
drip-strings of muscle.

 

ITEMS OPENED, CLOSED, AND DISCUSSED

~NRC Inspection Report No. 50-029/2003-002
Opened

………………..NONE

Closed

………………..NONE

Discussed

………………..NONE

After declaring this item “An Official Agency Record” it will/will not be released to the Public.
HUMAN SHADOW ON STONE

Sitting on the steps
in front of the bank,

waiting for it to open,
waiting for it

to anesthetize as holy—
brighter than day.

Stone steps whitened
by heat rays.

The place a person
roosted remains

dark. Shaped charges
batter my heart:

Little Boy. Fat Man.
Pika don (Flash-

boom). As soon as
we name them—they die.

 

*****