Natasha Kessler
Natasha Kessler is the author of Dismantling the Rabbit Altar and the collaborative chapbook SDVIG (alice blue books). She received an MFA from the University of Nebraska, and her work has appeared in journals such as South Dakota Review, Sugar House Review, Sixth Finch, and Puerto del Sol, among others.
Ignitor
We have always been here. Flame consuming
what makes it burn.
Beauty in an era with no suggestion of swans.
Can you see it?
Close to the fire, mouth slicks with questions.
More a hollow sound
like a wound worth inhabiting.
Take it…
because fire never waits, always demands
something more.
Tonight we bear witness—
all things finally exposed before you.
Tomorrow we are
ruins, lovers,
in this sudden bend of light.
Teaching Sister Shadows
onyx stone in a book—
—the glisten on your “Poppy Faze” nails—
—an edge of window— —white waiting room and questions—
—blurred faces swell in front of you, mother sharks circling in open water—
—rape kit and a glass of juice—shadows, sister…move your hands along the wall.
Teaching Sister Water
Be the wider tide,
movable, blurred thin,
a shyer one,
secret genre agape.
Here, in this ruined quiet
even the sparrows crush you,
want of you just the same.
Teaching Sister Scissors
Make yourself sharp—
what you get inside the whale,
the whale wanting water,
lost beyond lost,
in the night,
in the dim.
—in an alley where someone says, Hey, pretty girl.
Teaching Sister Falling
Won’t say believe me. Say inhale.
Say kerosene pressed into throats.
Won’t say coal-black. Say nothing.
Say cloudy water, ruptured eye.
Won’t say these poems are just theories.
Sister, blushed with small blood, Stand up.