Two Poems
by S.G. Mallett
RECIEVED FORMS
Sifting cinnabar from cinnabar
educable by the light’s spectral
typeset and parallax hastate tracks
we watched the mouseion flare
in a first burst about the unmoved
parousia enumerated, lead
sigils harden into definite figures.
Lemongrasses recall workers to hives.
Anything real bleeds.
Fuck, it was just here, a bird yells,
and as bits of hide expose
their ligulate skin to the tide, tan from
the brine, palls like panisc ribs,
I begin to glow and levitate.
AFTER THE HERMIT ST. PETER OF MORRONE RECIEVES THE NEWS OF HIS PAPAL ELECTION
To the circuit of all space, you said
a butcher begins by studying the whole
of an ox before they see the ox as parts.
The morass and play of his hands
through light lock and unlock the sign,
the clear nexus in a c of fingers here.
Carve the quick of it!, ground to a fine
spagyric powder, an augend of the stress
tensor flames fan the clay from matter to form,
I mark the shock of it!, each star locks
into gear and clears off the wooden definitions.
Match node to feature,
frozen in came glasswork—fortune’s crossing
the cave-stream—amber houses
not the dreamer, but the dream,
as if they’d been hiding from the world for a second time.
S.G. Mallett is a Best of the Net nominated poet whose books include Disparate Logoi (Alien Buddha Press) and A Brief History of Scarecrows (Back Room), who reads for Chestnut Review and has work in Bruiser, Heavy Feather Review, and Roi Faineant.
COLD SIGNAL 