Rachel Moritz • Minneapolis, MN | WinterRed Press

About the Writer
Rachel Moritz has poems appearing or forthcoming in Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Indiana Review and other journals. Her poetry chapbook, The Winchester Monologues, won the 2005 New Michigan Press Competition. She lives in Minneapolis, where she edits WinteRed Press, a chaplet publisher of innovative poetry.

Nascency

Here’s a cavern of bone & its corrugate host
inside,               sinew the red crown

announcing us

ardor

Here’s a gorgeous entreaty of shell, the houses within houses

heave along your back, pearl

of spiraling              what can I say,

I feel as if I’m shrugging you off,             Earth
all of what isn’t useful

Bark canals the boughs of an ear

Mollusks lineated by more of themselves                       

Skulls of earth from consulate clouds

            —a cap with molded visor

(I’ve made a siren
with my eyes)

But leaping between us                        there is no confluence

Sound takes place

in a ridden, long hello                        where I am & what kind of hollowing comes out

flaming sword                       

the stream of your mouth


Nascency (2)

     In the body we listened to a desiccate goat.

     Who bayed and made us fallow.  Who stretched us, impregnate tarps sitting
in snow.  Each interior’s sonic stiletto.

     In the whole wave as it applied to life, there was this question.  In the paperous
skin on the penis left.    In the uterine clam shell pinching recital.   

    As life is lived, as death is known forever in the mind.   As they made us,
treading our girded lights.     

    The nerves branched a bleached ivy, arterial paint shocked through the brained man’s voice box, flayed for flight.

    And we were hooked, plastinate as stars and non-recurrent any longer.

    In the body we were as what was seen and known forever in the mind.   We had wished this idea of time would drain our cells and leave us.

[Mackerel clouds in reverse]

Late in the night, or so in the middle. A barge with its sacrificial lights electrifies the lake. As a matter of quantity, how much do you love your little question? She makes but scant breath through the window pane, undresses her etheric body rendered as she was. The lake, passage past the stuck point around her, but a smallish distance in the mind. A vast measuring! Red scaffolds of clouds, the morning rocks as granite circles. How much is your emotion eating salt from their weathered skin, lining a vaporous white witness? Past but the visible furrow, sand an object who erases itself. As you can’t swallow in your throat either exiting or digest. I mean, returning your question with some imprint of yes.

[Between still and moving water]

As you were standing on the boundary or as you were of that bald lineation. Renaming the sound of the bell across the lake, green as the lawn delivered holy. How you dragged from the moss-embalmed water its wild face. On a path with both legs as if spooned from the fertile concave. Sound’s inner dusk. Synapse of boarding. You carried the bell down those deft and irrevocable stairs. Passed the sentence of doubt and kept moving.