CONJUNCTIONS: A Web Exclusive
Sandra Meek
Healing By Secondary Intention
Dark rosette in the lung’s
pewter lace, early autumn chill
Splinters of coal
asbestos mist
the long
intention of habit, pack
after pack
Now she is all
effect, and all
coming out at once, the hair she combs
to dogwood and oak-
crisped air—
Secondary intention:
a dog bite heals by leaving
the palm unstitched, the wound
open
Astringent sky, morning
a feathered arch, quilled light
Summer a lost net
of held rain
Spring, I will find her, all down this street
Birds’ nests, threaded with silver
On Vengeance
Surfacing starved out the heart
of swallowed salt from the kelp’s
black bulb, glitter
a shattering of skin, crystals
clinging to the strand
of yarn a child soaks in brine
to replicate the miracle
of evaporation shimmering in a jelly jar, icy
wick sparking
an approximation of winter, close
as you get this far south, the world brief
under glass, yard
a broken abacus, each grass blade beaded
with petrified light. Sky
fallen to ice.
That hard flight.
New Construction
Nothing stops the north drift down, not rising
off-season heat, not bandaged roofs marooning a continent’s
storm-gnawed edge, not orange groves ground beneath skeletons
of houses staccatoed with sawdust and wire scrollings
sleeved in caution’s seal-sleek skin, the marrow
what electrifies—
Cadaver by cadaver, the scaffold of bone
breaks down, as a toothpick-thin ship threads
away from its bottle’s blown glass—bone
morticians looted and sold: fibula, femur
plied from limbs rag-dolled and rigged
to sheath plumbing pipes to pass the body
through open-casketed view,
the canal of air rich with lily,
carnation. What’s missing
re-circuits into the still-
breathing suspended in a surgical theater three
blinkered states away—
You can drive all the way to country
and never touch earth; you can bottom out
in heartland where vaulted wheat
volts away from the silo’s erect
conical tip, harvest
a reversal of light, a flowing-back into the body falling silver
storey by swirling storey, as groundwater
siphoned from arteries tangled in bedrock slips down pipes’
copper-laced throats, southern light streaming
faucet to hose to embedded
flowers along a drive the spreading desert beads
with bird-shot—
Bone by bone, tooth
by tooth, the thorntrees’ splintered staircase
sweeps to flame; fist by fist, pulped pines
paper the sky with phantom-limb, phantom-
needle, so what drills the distance
deeper isn’t the question
mark of a dust devil raising a scrim
of spat-up sand and mica-wings, but what shivers the blown-
open silence—chaff of the hilltop
dynamited to foundations, to concrete’s fluent
stiffening mimicking the shattered
ladder of stone didn’t we think would always hold us
up through the whitened
and widening air.
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