Sky, Wound, Mouth That Eats Itself

abstractly in communion with Lucie Brock-Broido’s “The Halo That Would Not Light”

*
We are half alive in the yellowing heart of late September.
The body of the country is hemorrhaging with fire. Fires

Blazing on a map; red Christmas baubles—tumors
Surfacing on the radiograph of a chest. A cicada

Set down on my skirt last Sunday & stayed;
Flickered with flinders of sun. I contemplated, briefly,

The kaleidoscope wings. The wings like the work of a glassblower.
The gilt of leaves. The guilt of leaving. If only I had fed my father

The yellowing foliage of a late September like this.
Would the guilt of leaving have burned hot like a coal

In the leaf pile of his stomach? After years & years of wishing
This guilt into the body of my father, was his ulcer my wish completed?

Again, I contemplated tymbals. The music box whose melody was the score
Of The Spectacular Catastrophe of My Endless Childhood.

*
Posthumous Dispatch To Lucie in the rasping frequencies of poetic intersubjectivity:
Dear L.,

Is it ever really done?

*
Morning is quick as a guillotine.
A sharp blade of light. The sun,

A uvula in the bronze bell of the sky. The sky is pealing & peeling.
Flakes of a patinaed sky falling into lakes, becoming lily pads; floating.

To my undisclosed in Texas, I send epistolary messages. They go: Dear H.,
I fear so much. I fear cicadaless summers. I fear the motherless end of my life.

My mother is always the familiar field in my dreams.
The one of Blue False Indigo & Oxeye Daisy. The one I rest in.

The one I hope I molder in when I am old & ready, like the hollowed out truck
I saw once in a graveyard of forsaken trucks somewhere in rural New Jersey.

The rusted skeleton of it. The wildflower resurgence of it.
Those aged & oxidized bones of steel & aluminum groaning

In significant gusts of summer wind. Black Eyed Susans blooming
From the engine bay’s engineless mouth. Wildflower words. Bombinating verses

Of honey bees by the dozens. Lone locutions of locomotives far off in the distance.
Yellow life’s reliance on the mouth of the sky & her language of rain.

Her cloudburst utterances. Her snowfall songs. Her thunderous tongue. The sun,
A uvula in the mouth of the sky. The sky is open—jawless—elegizing.

*
In the field of my mother,

The ghost of the girl I was

Frolics. She is fatherless & fearful & feral still, eating red
Christmas baubles like fire. Eating cicadas like stained glass.

She watches the clouds for hours, wondering
About words & wounds. I tell her a word is a wild bird

Egg in the warm nest of a sentence. I tell her a wound is a mouth

That eats itself.

Mackenzie Schubert is a Hungarian-American poet. She resides in Ithaca, NY, where she is a first year MFA candidate at Cornell University. Her present work explores postmemory, her grandmother’s history as one of the 200,000 refugees of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, and the intergenerational repetition of fatherlessness.