by Sophie Strand
The Coppiced Heart
Mist-polished oak stumps, wet yellow, freshly
beheaded, inspires me to press my own chest:
the place in me that has also been cut down
to its pelvic resin.
But give it a year. Two years. Three or four.
And the resurrection will not be a shifted stone
or empty tomb. No. Look for a forest
of tuning forks. Vs of trees risen in the joined
music of strained wind.
All erupted from one trunk. Polyphonies
of leaf and bark and branch. Each
contrapuntal thread sprouted from the sore
spot I thought was surely dead.
Ah! Cut me down to double this desire.
Call forth from my bare trunk, the triplicity
of all I can be. I see it now. With the oak’s
exploded self. There are many of me
growing towards many of you.
The Wedding
Marry me to the Karner Blue Butterfly.
Lead us into the thick, periwinkle
shade of an American Chesnut stand.
Glue our minds together with
ghost sap, nuts fallen into fossils,
honey from a flower no longer allowed
to wed itself. No longer allowed its color.
Say False Foxglove. Gowen’s Orchid.
Or frayed dust from Pearl Weed someone
pressed into the Song of Songs in a hotel
bible.
Marry me to the mountain sliced open for coal.
Marry me to the Capa Rose. The Virginia
Round-Leaf Birch.
So that when they no longer sweeten a season.
So that when one tree susurrates for a mate that
will never send back answering wind.
There will be someone to keen. There will be someone
to rip her shirt. Tear her hair.
Marry me to these precarious colors.
Make me a widow of a blackening hour.
And I promise, with an amber ring
of Thismia around my finger, to
grow into the eternity of mourning.
Menstrual Ode
Here is a cup of what I can spare:
slipped pith, core of moon, liquid
ember. The food of me I choose
to feed generously to the furrow.
Pour into the mountain-shadowed
field as a prayer for the coming springtime.
I’ll lie in the thimbleweed, turn my head
to the side and say: this field is my body.
This daylily shivers with my blood. These
puffballs enclose a fairy ring because
I am plenty. I am enough.
I am a valley stream dispersing red
snowmelt. My own completed seasons.
Here, a handful of womb. A room
full of anemones. A rainstorm
of rusted light. Shards of rainbow.
A sword of soft, pink wine.
Back into the coil of soil and fungal thread
that weaves forward the footprints
of my future dance
Pussy
Thorn of musk. Lavender brine.
Muscled sluice of the rose open
in monsoon. Mine mine mine.
Pelt of jet fur and star shine. Red
gold. Run through with rusted
ivy. Lustrous. Sucker of light.
Disperser of solstice black
Wine. Pearl claw. Burnt sugar
on the glass lip.
Mine mine mine.
The Final Lesson
Whatever comes next, still,
blue birds, less humans perhaps,
less text, less books, more
oceans open to the page where
the boats float into a sturgeon
full moon reflection wrinkled
by the movement of a whale
below. More love, although
less human hearts to disrupt
the world’s more love. Or
we become love. Yes, that’s it.
Listen to it. Mycelial love.
Love like tendrils of starlight
through soil, sewing tree
to tree. Love first and now
and forever. Love the tender
animal of our last days.
About the author
Sophie Strand is a freelance writer based in Kingston, New York. She finds her poems in the exposed root systems of fallen pines and rattlesnake nests on mountain summits. She has three chapbooks: Love Song to a Blue God (Oread Press) and Those Other Flowers To Come (Dancing Girl Press) and The Approach (The Swan). Her poems have been published by www.poetry.org, Braided Way Magazine, Your Impossible Voice, The Doris, Persephone’s Daughters, and Entropy. Read more @cosmogyny.
