Votive
The figure of God’s Mother appears to me
in plastic, in miniature. What does it mean
to be fleshless, to be permanent? To be
unable to bend or to move on your own.
Then the dog of fire kisses my eyes open.
His gentle tail betrays the Son of God unfolded:
multiplied; God was schizophrenic, like me,
multiple, like me. That was before God
was a man, when God still had a Mother.
Heterodoxy
What is delusion, though? God loves the hungry.
But the holy anorexic feels abandoned after eating
only God, her host. Every forty days, medications
are manufactured from the remnants of exertion.
And what if you drown in the song you are singing
because the palate is ice? Sense in the bloodstream
it is midnight on that earth and the winter streams
from semi-tortured mouths. Carry the evidence
in case you are questioned. Avoid the tunnel
of fatal sound sent out to find you. The left eye
twitches in the glaring light. Reenact your fall:
the moment you hit the cement you collapsed
into waves of ululating sinew, understanding grace.
Haruspex *Δ↭*
The haruspex *Δ↭* is summoned
to read my entrail’s omens,
the crows given a chance to translate
before the last sacrifice. >)))) >)))) >)))) A foreign
spark ^^^ ignites heaven’s embassy windows.{0}{0}
Carrier pigeons (<>) blink in delight.
Fierce and terrorized, half »« dead
and holy ° inside my suppurating ““ wound. : > —
An errant wind whistles, cold flung along
stripped corridors \\ , spent nebula fingers ~~~~~
grasp nothing. A great cat ↨↨↨↨ shoots past:
all my memories thrash weakly ↜¦°↯⨈↝
in the vice {⨞⁅⨞⁆⨞} of his jaws. Terrible green ⨝
stillness, a silence I cannot decipher. <(((( <(((( <((((
The inchpin wound (⨌) around the child’s neck
puts my dreams to rest. ↜ ⨀ ↝ Soon all will be
abolished: this whole world >))))
has been expressed.
Lake Angela
Lake Angela is a poet, translator, and dancer-choreographer who creates at the confluence of verbal language and movement. She holds a PhD in the intersemiotic translation of Austrian Expressionist poetry into dance and has her MFA in poetry. She is a medieval mystic, beguine, and nonhuman creature. Her full-length books of poetry, Organblooms (2020) and Words for the Dead (2021), are available from FutureCycle Press. Recent work appears in The Bitter Oleander, Seneca Review, filling Station, Poetry Salzburg Review, Passages North, and others. Lake is poetry editor for the multilingual literature and arts journal Punt Volat, and her Neurodivergence advocacy articles appear in the Swedish publication Brainz Magazine. As director of the poetry-dance group Companyia Lake Angela, she presents the value of schizophrenia spectrum creativity. She welcomes visitors at www.lakeangeladance.com.
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