Corinne Dekkers is a Canadian-American poet. Her work can be found through Tolsun Books, Denver Quarterly, Smartish Pace, and elsewhere. She lives in Mississippi.
THEY OWN EVERYTHING
— after Graham Foust
The animal market makes a living
of selling our forests back to us. How
many orbits circle one maple and
how many eyes paint lidless
around it? Cherry
resin smooths
beyond dovetail
a knot-notch and hooks
silver the sunfish
fanned to a wall.
From outside we push the domestic in.
GIANT OR BLACKBIRD | PARIS, 1889
At evening the wolf tourmalines
brings all the birds black
and the etching of the river
shears perpetually Tivoli in morning
and when the wolf leaves you leave
too three bright jets along the porch
an inverse of where you aren’t
alone our giant still breathing
A CROSSING LAYER OF WHAT ISN’T
— after James Turrell’s Roden Crater
Consider the edge of blue:
In Jerome you are the blur
lilting the mountain falling
behind you a verdant rush
of your edges
the crumble of haunted
and city and
in Jerome you are
a picture of you
You are a picture of you
in the cathedral in crater
a caldera
a picture in all the days lined
to its construction
SEVERAL LOVE
If we grew pictures
from the trees used
to build this house
these rooms after
brick clean washed
they’d be Queen
Anne’s lace little
cloud hearts top
brimmed white in
their telling north
east wind to settle
low out back past
half-circle stalks
pressing sloe eyes
up for ten a.m.
I will draw nothing
but vessels from here
on out windglasses
champagne bottles
only no swords no
halves no cuts
to the swimming past
months explaining
spaces lines of white
waves folding black
up for winter trains:
spots to sit to read
your name away from
the outline it makes
underground now and
now away from that lot
of hard breathing that
keeps the robin’s egg
in the holding forest
greened solid to rock
split lime where
the heart should be
ARSENOPYRITE
Your lovers light boxes shake ladles silver
still to strike three inches tall one inch
across this binding this hour distance
bronzeburnished pooling stonefish vessels
sulfur rungs sheets wound pacific
grace to bear your faith restored your
eyes Orion crooked long waiting night
off center long promise anchored stoic
settled for bed just not for keeps
Let me call you the oil you carry bathwater
greenflashed slim prophecy sloping your
skin to ask again two lettered as twilight
slows the basement
EXCEPT US
in the dream no one sees you unless obliquely
your rose markers rosecompact press
shore and shore silt and hand and try
to dig you out