Scream

Photograph of Antarctic blue ice near the Queen Fabiola Mountains by USGS on Unsplash

Scream

gordian one at those who hesitate and will not 
come undone,               or ever go away.

I place my knee to press Telemachus’ young spine 
up by the sea.                 

He has few answers for the waves.

What else is there for him to do. . .
hang upside down and fetal in a glass bottle 
of lost ships?  

Children know what absence means.

Words drift up sideways then disappear into the EightBall 
of Childhood where for one inky instant the alphabet coheres 
with Yes indeed,    then slips untenably into: Come Back Later  
( if you're alive in some other life).

Katherine Soniat's eighth collection of poems—Polishing the Glass Storm—will be published by LSU Press in 2022. Bright Stranger was published in 2016 by that same press. The Goodbye Animals was awarded the 2014 Turtle Island Chapbook Award. A Shared Life won the Iowa Poetry Prize and The Swing Girl (LSU Press) was selected as Best Collection of 2011 by the North Carolina Poetry Council. Her poems have appeared in the Denver Quarterly, Women's Review of Books, Iowa Review, Poetry, Superstition Review, and The Nation, among others. Visit her at http://www.katherinesoniat.com

(c) 2021 Katherine Soniat