IN FULL LIGHT
Rain the color of saffron,
a curtain of amber.
Rain flooding music inside full of flood,
we’re all returning
the way water returns, (on our way
to the river)—
Pigeons slap their feet in puddles,
evanescent as a word spoken
in the sunrise, a flood that flattens into trespass
the rest, the way your mouth—
We’re all dancing an empty white wine dance floor—thrown
over a bridge
tumbling under cold stream water
the shingles and more off the roof.
If
we drag our fingers down
the abyss is right there:
a cold moving river from the boat.
MALACHITE
It was like the night I was six, stunned, I braced myself
against the bed frame of my grandmother’s guest bed—
at the base of the bed a presence, something watching me.
I was immobilized for hours, knowing it would take me
to Hades if I moved. So I didn’t move, didn’t breathe.
Like that night we were in the bar, Coleman Hawkings’
“Don’t Take Your Love From Me” playing, the amber
and green and yellow and clear liquor bottles before us,
your voice sounding as though you were just resurrected
from ancient Egypt’s Field of Malachite, pure paradise and
you must have been, handing me the green stone, still cool
instead of warm from your hand. “To understand the language
of animals,” you said. But I wasn’t humble. “I already understand
the language of animals,” I replied. My mistake, my glance
up to the corner of the ceiling to take a moment, and by
the time I glanced back, you were gone, and in your place—
a vacuum, a hole, a waiting, a breathy anticipation, as evil
and strange as the presence from the base of the bed so many
years before. But I held your gift, heavy, still cool in my palm,
an invitation to leave this place, a thread to another world.
And why does anyone take their love away? And how could
you be waiting for me when you no longer exist?
Lindsay Remee Ahl has work published in The Georgia Review, Hotel Amerika, Barrow Street, BOMB Magazine, The Offing, and many others. She was a Fletcher Fellow at Bread Loaf for her novel, Desire, (Coffee House Press). She holds an MFA from Warren Wilson in Poetry.
theboilerjournal.com 