Mande Zecca is a postdoctoral fellow in the Expository Writing
Program at Johns Hopkins University. She recently completed
her Ph.D. in English at Johns Hopkins and holds an M.F.A. in
poetry from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Her writing
(critical and creative) has appeared or is forthcoming in
Modernism/modernitqy, Post45, Jacket2,
Colorado Review, CutBank, and elsewhere.
Program at Johns Hopkins University. She recently completed
her Ph.D. in English at Johns Hopkins and holds an M.F.A. in
poetry from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Her writing
(critical and creative) has appeared or is forthcoming in
Modernism/modernitqy, Post45, Jacket2,
Colorado Review, CutBank, and elsewhere.
GRIMOIRE
Out of which thicket do I drag the dark
of my desire? Obdurate speech, to which
hollow dost thou flit? If the eye and the
world can be said to mirror each other,
then every heart is terrifying. Every
I that shudders into knowing risks a
violent end. To bend yourself into the
landscape, repeat arbor as ardor, a
cadence blacker than any love.
To unpronounce yourself, startle your body
into blueness. The sky over us now
a banner in winter’s gory light.
The rock’s iron and now the blood’s, singing.
Cracked egg of witness — what I saw, I was.