Kirsty Singer is a desert-dwelling poet, teacher, editor and scholar with a past life in public health. Her poetry can be seen at PENAmerica and H_NGM_N, and heard at Jupiter88 and at the Machine Project Mystery Theatre Poetry Archives. Tertullian’s Daughter is her first chapbook.
Awash
among the twisted dark shapes in the dusk-light
I need a trowel (I hear an owl)
to dig a better hole. How many flowers
have to die to deposit this
small fistula in good earth?
gold cylinders littered about, bent
to the indeterminate will (their plastic shells
this morning invented mumblecore
“rocking and hooting to scare us away”
this is what matters:
shadow train
moving across the land, peeling out
—what kind of gap
opens up in sand—the spine pricks
to have hoarded the meaning of light (more than
average bad) the point was warmth, stupid
to see a creature LEAP, LEAP, LEAP—
in the margins of and want to shoot
“your real dying looks like play dying”
whatever in our mouths rinsing sick
I have spent my cheap virtigineity on trinkets
some call food: what do I have to say? HISTORY
IS WHAT HURTS (the great un-wind un-wood
-en hands moving my own generosity a mechanics of