Bianca Diaz

WHAT BLACK MAGIC CAN DO

Night’s celestial machinations begin

while you orbit me, a satellite,
a moth devoted to a bulb. You and I

are a pair. The front lawn sighs.

Dusk’s gulls ascend, feathers exhale mites.

You and I
are mercury in the palm,
invisible streaks
gleam over heart and life lines. If I turn

myself inside out, you will still know me.
If I slough off pieces of myself, you will gather

and reassemble me, your hands

industrious carpenter ants. Candles begin to be lit;
flames sip oxygen and bend in dark rooms.

Without you, I am a little mutant:
a long-necked thing in a tree,
my frantic gills contracting then
releasing the sickening, sap-sweet air.

Thinning clouds band the night sky
like a fungus.

I tell myself that forging you
repaired something in me,
something slack and dumb. I am made
obedient through the dark art of puppetry.

You say you are the real thing.
I, benighted, balk at the dark,
at the absorbent moon, at the shadowplay
that sutures me to you.

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Bianca Diaz’s chapbook, No One Says Kin Anymore, won the Robert Watson Poetry Award from Spring Garden Press in 2009. She earned an MFA from George Mason University and is originally from Miami, Florida. She taught high school English and Creative Writing for seven years and currently lives and writes full time in North Carolina. Her poems are forthcoming in Sundog Lit and Ellipsis.