Monologue of the Airborn Feminine
by Susan Sonde
I’m a wing so you’re a wing, a fast turning cloud, sphere of white bliss: bi-located and ascendant. This reality once repeated itself before the flash of forgetting came and narrowed it. The clouds now are no longer rosy and the quotidian, the brief orange life of its match yields to extinction’s bright lava. Fire once loved now singes, sets us down at zero meridian: our new space
is a crawl space
honeycomb pressed in concrete; its chambers still wet cover us in quicklime, erode us at the horizon line located as of late right behind the thumbnail. What’s there is lacking and needs the sun to beat down, plywood made limber, wing nuts loosened.
We saw the air but not with wings.
We row with limbs on fire, take a scalding from hot mornings and arrive in bedlam where the air dines daily on static. Screens go blank, rockers revolt and the ground terminals are hot-wired but not grounded. Our bodies convulse, short-circuit like switches on water, a river of ions
passes through our mind-charts, impurities gather at drain in our flow-charts. Charge attaches to the antipodes so that east knows west by its stride, by the quantity of noose knots tied and the numbers they collar.
Everything’s a frame for the mirror in which the heart can see its spitting image, the half that remains.
Forthright are the prospects of the lamb. Its perspicacity doesn’t stray. It lies awake nights. Sleep is not its solution. It eats while standing in the rain below breath. Its quarrels are with the stars.
It knows stars, thinks mouthfuls of stars.
About the Author
Susan Sonde is an award winning poet and short story writer. Her debut collection: In the Longboats with Others won the Capricorn Book Award and was published by New Rivers Press. The Arsonist, her fifth collection will be released May 2019 from Main Street Rag. Her sixth collection, Evenings at the Table of an Intoxicant was a finalist in the New Rivers New Voices 2019 contest. Grants and awards include, a National Endowment Award in poetry; grants in fiction and poetry from The Maryland State Arts Council; The Gordon Barber Memorial Award from The Poetry Society of America. Her collection The Chalk Line was a finalist in The National Poetry Series. Individual poems have appeared in Barrow Street, The North American Review, The Southern Humanities Review, The Mississippi Review, American Letters and Commentary, Bomb, New Letters, Southern Poetry Review, and many others.